Flood & Loot: A Systemic Attack On The Lightning Network
Jona Harris, Aviv Zohar

TL;DR
This paper analyzes a systemic attack on the Lightning Network that can overload the Bitcoin blockchain, steal funds, and disrupt transaction processing, highlighting vulnerabilities and proposing mitigation strategies.
Contribution
It provides a detailed analysis of a systemic attack on the Lightning Network, evaluates its costs and impacts, and suggests mitigation strategies to reduce systemic risk.
Findings
Attack can overload Bitcoin blockchain with requests
Attackers can steal funds locked in channels
Most nodes accept unknown channel requests
Abstract
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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsBlockchain Technology Applications and Security · Smart Grid Security and Resilience · Distributed systems and fault tolerance
