Improvements of the Balance Discovery Attack on Lightning Network Payment Channels

Gijs van Dam; Rabiah Abdul Kadir; Puteri N. E.  Nohuddin; Halimah Badioze Zaman

Paper 2019/1385 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2019/1385 ↗

Improvements of the Balance Discovery Attack on Lightning Network Payment Channels

Gijs van Dam

Rabiah Abdul Kadir

Puteri N. E. Nohuddin

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: Preprint.
History: 2020-09-23: last updated; 2019-12-04: published
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2019/1385
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1385}
}