Paper 2019/1385
Improvements of the Balance Discovery Attack on Lightning Network Payment Channels
Gijs van Dam, Rabiah Abdul Kadir, Puteri N. E. Nohuddin, and Halimah Badioze Zaman
Abstract
The Lighting Network (LN) is a network of micropayment channels that runs on top of Bitcoin. The balances of payment channels are not broadcasted to the LN network to preserve the privacy of the nodes participating in the network. A balance disclosure attack (BDA) has been proven to be successful in determining the balance of large amount of channels in the network. In this paper we propose an improved algorithm for the BDA as well as a new type of attack that leverages the differences between LN client software implementations. Our improved algorithm extends the original BDA by performing payments from both sides of the channel. The new attack uses malformed payments to shutdown payment channels an adversary isn't part of.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. SEC 2020, IFIP AICT
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-3-030-58201-2_21
- Keywords
- BitcoinLightning NetworkNetwork Security
- Contact author(s)
- p95677 @ siswa ukm edu my
- History
- 2020-09-23: revised
- 2019-12-04: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2019/1385
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/1385,
author = {Gijs van Dam and Rabiah Abdul Kadir and Puteri N. E. Nohuddin and Halimah Badioze Zaman},
title = {Improvements of the Balance Discovery Attack on Lightning Network Payment Channels},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2019/1385},
year = {2019},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-58201-2_21},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1385}
}