Paper 2019/1149
LockDown: Balance Availability Attack against Lightning Network Channels
Cristina Pérez-Solà, Alejandro Ranchal-Pedrosa, Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí, Guillermo Navarro-Arribas, and Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro
Abstract
The Lightning Network (LN) is a payment network running as a second layer on top of Bitcoin and other Blockchains. This paper presents the possibility of performing a balance lockdown in the LN due to misbehaving nodes associated to a given channel. We formalize and introduce a practical attack, minimizing the economic cost of the attack. We present results that validate our claims, and provide experimental results and potential countermeasures to handle the problem.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Preprint. MINOR revision.
- Keywords
- BitcoinBlockchainNetwork SecurityOff-chain payments channelsLightning Network (LN)Denial of Service.
- Contact author(s)
- jordi herrera @ uab cat
- History
- 2019-10-07: received
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2019/1149
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/1149,
author = {Cristina Pérez-Solà and Alejandro Ranchal-Pedrosa and Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí and Guillermo Navarro-Arribas and Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro},
title = {{LockDown}: Balance Availability Attack against Lightning Network Channels},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2019/1149},
year = {2019},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1149}
}
