Strategic Analysis of Griefing Attack in Lightning Network

Article Type

Research Article

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management

Abstract

Hashed Timelock Contract (HTLC) in Lightning Network is susceptible to a griefing attack. An attacker can block several channels and stall payments by mounting this attack. A state-of-the-art countermeasure, Hashed Timelock Contract with Griefing-Penalty (HTLC-GP) is found to work under the classical assumption of participants being either honest or malicious but fails for rational participants. To address the gap, we introduce a game-theoretic model for analyzing griefing attacks in HTLC. We use this model to analyze griefing attacks in HTLC-GP and conjecture that it is impossible to design an efficient protocol that will penalize a malicious participant with the current Bitcoin scripting system. We study the impact of the penalty on the cost of mounting the attack and observe that HTLC-GP is weakly effective in disincentivizing the attacker in certain conditions. To further increase the cost of attack, we introduce the concept of guaranteed minimum compensation, denoted as ζ , and modify HTLC-GP into HTLC-GPζ. By experimenting on several instances of Lightning Network, we observe that the total coins locked in the network drops to 28% for HTLC-GPζ , unlike in HTLC-GP where total coins locked does not drop below 40%. These results justify that HTLC -GPζ is better than HTLC-GP to counter griefing attacks.

First Page

1790

Last Page

1803

DOI

https://10.1109/TNSM.2022.3230768

Publication Date

6-1-2023

Comments

Open Access, Green

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