Time is Money: Countering Griefing Attack in Lightning Network

Mazumdar, Subhra; Banerjee, Prabal; Ruj, Sushmita

doi:10.1109/trustcom50675.2020.00138

Cited by 8 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…Analyzing the game model for HTLC-GP, we find that the attacker has the option of griefing without paying any penalty. We realize that the protocol fails to compensate uncorrupted parties, and the security proof stated in [15] is not sufficient to justify the benefit of the countermeasure.…”

Section: Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Honest parties cannot earn a fee by processing transactions. In the next section, we discuss another payment protocol, Hashed Timelock Contract with Griefing-Penalty or HTLC-GP [15], that claims to counter griefing attacks.…”

Section: Griefing Attack In Lightning Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Punishing a malicious node by using reverse bonds in an off-chain contract forwarding payments [16] or griefing-penalty in HTLC-GP [15], [17] to compensate honest parties has already been proposed. We provide a high-level overview of HTLC-GP using the payment instance stated in Fig.…”

Section: Overview Of Htlc-gp and Challenges Facedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…• Using the same model, we analyze another payment protocol, Hashed Timelock Contract with Griefing Penalty or HTLC-GP [15], that claims to counter griefing attack. Analyzing the game model for HTLC-GP, we find that the attacker has the option of griefing without paying any penalty.…”

Section: Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We discuss a payment protocol, proposed in one of our papers [15], [17] that uses penalty as a countermeasure. The protocol HTLC is modified to counter griefing attack, thus it is termed as Hashed Timelock Contract with Griefing Penalty or HTLC-GP.…”

Section: Hashed Timelock Contract With Griefing Penalty or Htlc-gpmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Strategic Analysis to defend against Griefing Attack in Lightning Network

Mazumdar¹,

Banerjee²,

Sinha³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Payments routed in Lightning Network are susceptible to a griefing attack. In this attack, the channels get blocked, and the affected parties cannot process any payment request. Our work is the first to analyze griefing attacks in Hashed Timelock Contract or HTLC, from a game-theoretic point of view. Using the same model, we analyze another payment protocol Hashed Timelock Contract with Griefing-Penalty or HTLC-GP, which was proposed to counter griefing attacks. We find that HTLC-GP is weakly effective in disincentivizing the attacker. To further increase the cost of attack, we introduce the concept of guaranteed minimum compensation and integrate it into HTLC-GP. This modified payment protocol is termed HTLC-GP ζ and unlike HTLC-GP, the protocol considers the participants to act rationally. By experimenting on several instances of Lightning Network, we show that the capacity locked drops to 40% in the case of HTLC-GP when the rate of griefing-penalty is set to 4.5 × 10 −5 , and 28% in the case of HTLC-GP ζ when guaranteed minimum compensation is 2.5% of the transaction amount. These results justify our claim that HTLC-GP ζ is better than HTLC-GP to counter griefing attacks.

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Section: Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Griefing Attack In Lightning Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%