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Resource type: Conference Paper BibTeX citation key: Biryukov2022 View all bibliographic details |
Categories: Not Monero-focused Keywords: Payment Channels Creators: Biryukov, Naumenko, Tikhomirov Collection: Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2022 |
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Attachments 132.pdf [23/2237] | URLs https://fc22.ifca. ... roceedings/132.pdf |
Abstract |
Bitcoin can process only a few transactions per second, which is insufficient for a global payment network. The Lightning Network (LN) aims to address this challenge. The LN allows for low-latency bitcoin transfers through a network of payment channels. In contrast to regu- lar Bitcoin transactions, payments in the LN are not globally broadcast. Thus it may improve not only Bitcoin’s scalability but also privacy. How- ever, the probing attack allows an adversary to discover channel balances, threatening users’ privacy. Prior work on probing did not account for the possibility of multiple (parallel) channels between two nodes. Naive probing algorithms yield false results for parallel channels. In this work, we develop a new probing model that accurately accounts for parallel channels. We describe jamming-enhanced probing that allows for full balance information extraction in multi-channel hops, which was impossible with earlier probing methods. We quantify the attacker’s in- formation gain and propose an optimized algorithm for choosing probe amounts for multi-channel hops. We demonstrate its efficiency based on real-world data using our own probing-focused LN simulator. Finally, we discuss countermeasures such as new forwarding strategies, intra-hop payment split, rebalancing, and unannounced channels. |