Author: Antoine Riard 2022-08-17 13:29:43
Published on: 2022-08-17T13:29:43+00:00
Gleb Naumenko and Antoine Riard have conducted a research on the channel jamming attacks affecting the Lightning Network. The research is based on Lightning Network data as of March 2022. They have a series of research posts available on their website, where they discuss the impacts of channel jamming, channel jamming costs, incremental solutions to channel jamming, solution design space, hold-time-dependent bidirectional fee schemes, and the reputation scheme: stake certificates + forwarding pass. In chapter one, they discuss how an attacker may steal routing fees or target victim's routing reputation, DoS a goods/service provider, the monetary implications victims may bear, how jamming could enhance probing, and how jamming may allow an attacker to drag LN users to other payment solutions. In chapter two, they discuss the on-chain aspect and the opportunity aspect of attack cost, describe cost optimizations, notice that the targeted attack costs are currently as low as thousands of satoshis, and discuss how an attacker may compensate for these costs.Chapter three analyzes several low-effort solutions to jamming, realizes their fundamental trade-offs, strong and weak points, discusses slot bucketing in detail (including "0-bucket strategy"), which is a good solution candidate. In chapter four, they make a broad overview of potential solutions (bonding to a payment; reward/punishment incentives), identify known and novel families of solutions, discuss their trade-offs, and put them in the context of DLC-over-Lightning and other similar "LiFi" protocols.Chapter five outlines the most advanced Upfront Payment fee scheme and identifies the trade-offs, discusses why it's hard to guarantee a game theoretic balance, and suggests improvements. In chapter six, they suggest a reputation-based solution based on the combination of two known ideas, discuss the associated challenges and the importance of designing a strong reputation policy. They suggest that the next steps could be either working on more solutions or choosing one of the already suggested. The ecosystem should decide which set of trade-offs (including solution complexity) is acceptable. This research should be seen as the synthesis of numerous ideas presented by other LN developers over the years, and they invite the best scrutiny and verification of model assumptions and research statements. Overall, channel jamming has been one of the oldest high-impact issues mentioned in the Lightning space. It's likely that any solution will have long-term impacts on the fundamental economic units of the network, and therefore they hope that such a solution finds the consensus of the LN development community as a whole.
Updated on: 2023-06-01T19:08:24.558274+00:00