LockDown: Balance Availability Attack Against Lightning Network Channels

Pérez-Solà, Cristina; Ranchal-Pedrosa, Alejandro; Herrera-Joancomartí, Jordi; Navarro‐Arribas, Guillermo; García-Alfaro, Joaquín

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-51280-4_14

Cited by 40 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Among other findings, they show that the ten most central nodes can disrupt roughly 80% of all paths using their attack. Pérez-Solà et al [32] present an attack that diminishes the capacity of a node's channels, preventing it from participating in the network. Tikhomirov et al [42] show how a wormhole attack prevents honest intermediaries from participating in routing payments.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Analysis of Privacy in the Lightning Network

Kappos

Yousaf

Piotrowska

et al. 2021

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Analysis of Privacy in the Lightning Network

Kappos

Yousaf

Piotrowska

et al. 2021

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…Tochner et al [60] analyze a DoS attack vector based on route hijacking. Pérez-Solà et al [52] introduce the LockDown attack where the adversary prevents an LN node from transacting by depleting the capacity in all its channels. In comparison, our HTLC depletion attack achieves the same result (a victim node can not forward payments), but exploits the HTLC limit at each channel rather than its capacity.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Quantitative Analysis of Security, Anonymity and Scalability for the Lightning Network

Tikhomirov

Moreno-Sanchez

Maffei

2020

2020 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW)

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Payment channel networks have been introduced to mitigate the scalability issues inherent to permissionless decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Launched in 2018, the Lightning Network (LN) has been gaining popularity and consists today of more than 5000 nodes and 35000 payment channels that jointly hold 965 bitcoins (9.2M USD as of June 2020). This adoption has motivated research from both academia and industry.Payment channels suffer from security vulnerabilities, such as the wormhole attack [39], anonymity issues [38], and scalability limitations related to the upper bound on the number of concurrent payments per channel [28], which have been pointed out by the scientific community but never quantitatively analyzed.In this work, we first analyze the proneness of the LN to the wormhole attack and attacks against anonymity. We observe that an adversary needs to control only 2% of nodes to learn sensitive payment information (e.g., sender, receiver, and amount) or to carry out the wormhole attack. Second, we study the management of concurrent payments in the LN and quantify its negative effect on scalability. We observe that for micropayments, the forwarding capability of up to 50% of channels is restricted to a value smaller than the channel capacity. This phenomenon hinders scalability and opens the door for denial-of-service attacks: we estimate that a network-wide DoS attack costs within 1.6M USD, while isolating the biggest community costs only 238k USD.Our findings should prompt the LN community to consider the issues studied in this work when educating users about path selection algorithms, as well as to adopt multi-hop payment protocols that provide stronger security, privacy and scalability guarantees.

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“…Among the 3 major implementations, LND uses the highest value of 10 blocks. Since a significant majority of nodes on the network run LND, as suggested in [20,21], most victims will publish their commitments at the same time (height). Along with the commitments, each victim will also publish many HTLC-success (local) transactions to claim the HTLC outputs from his commitment, leading to a high volume of transactions trying to enter the blockchain all at once.…”

Section: The Flood and Loot Attackmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It describes a way to disrupt the normal operation of a channel as a bi-directional route, by pushing its entire balance to one side, making it impossible to route payments in one direction. A detailed channel exhaustion attack is described in [21].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flood & Loot

Harris

Zohar

2020

Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies

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The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to happen rarely. One of the risks that was identified early on is that of a wide systemic attack on the protocol, in which an attacker triggers the closure of many Lightning channels at once. The resulting high volume of transactions in the blockchain will not allow for the proper settlement of all debts, and attackers may get away with stealing some funds. This paper explores the details of such an attack and evaluates its cost and overall impact on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. Specifically, we show that an attacker is able to simultaneously cause victim nodes to overload the Bitcoin blockchain with requests and to steal funds that were locked in channels. We go on to examine the interaction of Lightning nodes with the fee estimation mechanism and show that the attacker can continuously lower the fee of transactions that will later be used by the victim in its attempts to recover funds-eventually reaching a state in which only low fractions of the block are available for lightning transactions. Our attack is made easier even further as the Lightning protocol allows the attacker to increase the fee offered by his own transactions. We show that the vast majority of nodes agree to channel opening requests from unknown sources and are therefore susceptible to this attack. We highlight differences between various implementations of the Lightning Network protocol and review the susceptibility of each one to the attack. Finally, we propose mitigation strategies to lower the systemic attack risk of the network. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Distributed systems security.

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LockDown: Balance Availability Attack Against Lightning Network Channels

Cited by 40 publications

References 9 publications

An Empirical Analysis of Privacy in the Lightning Network

An Empirical Analysis of Privacy in the Lightning Network

A Quantitative Analysis of Security, Anonymity and Scalability for the Lightning Network

Flood & Loot

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