Paper 2019/1149

LockDown: Balance Availability Attack against Lightning Network Channels

Cristina Pérez-Solà and Alejandro Ranchal-Pedrosa and Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí and 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.