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Published in:
2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Improvements of the Balance Discovery Attack on Lightning Network Payment Channels
Authors : Gijs van Dam, Rabiah Abdul Kadir, Puteri N. E. Nohuddin, Halimah Badioze Zaman
Published in: ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
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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 amounts 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 is not part of.