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International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security

FC 2021: Financial Cryptography and Data Security pp 170–188Cite as

Congestion Attacks in Payment Channel Networks

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNSC,volume 12675)

Abstract

Payment channel networks provide a fast and scalable solution to relay funds, acting as a second layer to slower and less scalable blockchain protocols. In this paper, we present an accessible, low-cost attack in which the attacker paralyzes multiple payment network channels for several days. The attack is based on overloading channels with requests that are kept unresolved until their expiration time. Reaching the maximum allowed unresolved requests (\(\mathtt {HTLCs}\)) locks the channel for new payments. The attack is in fact inherent to the way off-chain networks are constructed, since limits on the number of unresolved payments are derived from limits on the blockchain. We consider three versions of the attack: one in which the attacker attempts to block as many high liquidity channels as possible, one in which it disconnects as many pairs of nodes as it can, and one in which it tries to isolate individual nodes from the network. We evaluate the costs of these attacks on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network and compare how changes in the network have affected the cost of attack. Specifically, we consider how recent changes to default parameters in each of the main Lightning implementations contribute to the attacks. Finally, we suggest mitigation techniques that make these attacks much harder to carry out.

Keywords

  • Lightning Network
  • Payment channel networks
  • Network security
  • HTLC

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  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_9
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Notes

  1. 1.

    We were able to find public record describing the basic idea of the attack, on a single channel [8, 31]. We note that no full translation of this vulnerability to the entire network was previously considered. Due to the public nature of these posts, we did not perform a disclosure of the vulnerability to the devs.

  2. 2.

    We give the defaults used in mainnet. Testnet behavior differs slightly.

  3. 3.

    We ignore disabled channels and channels with nodes that do not reveal their policies.

  4. 4.

    The snapshot from Mar 9th, 2019 was taken from [29, 30].

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Acknowledgments

We thank Itay Cohen, Nir Lavee and Zvi Yishai for providing improvements in our network partitioning algorithms and analysis.

This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant 1504/17) and by a grant from the HUJI Cyber Security Research Center in conjunction with the Israel National Cyber Bureau.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Ayelet Mizrahi & Aviv Zohar

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  1. Ayelet Mizrahi
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  2. Aviv Zohar
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Correspondence to Ayelet Mizrahi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Prof. Nikita Borisov

  2. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Claudia Diaz

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Mizrahi, A., Zohar, A. (2021). Congestion Attacks in Payment Channel Networks. In: Borisov, N., Diaz, C. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12675. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_9

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