Author: Antoine Riard 2022-11-06 23:27:44
Published on: 2022-11-06T23:27:44+00:00
Sergei Tikhomirov and Clara Shikhelman have presented a proposal to tackle jamming attacks on the Lightning Network. An attack on a payment channel can cause a "jam", in which an attacker prevents honest payments from being processed. The researchers distinguish between quick and slow jamming, with the former being failed and re-sent every few seconds, making them hard to distinguish from honest failing payments.To fight jamming, the authors propose a combination of unconditional fees and local reputation. Unconditional fees would discourage quick jamming as they would no longer be free, while local reputation would prevent slow jamming. The paper also introduces a general framework for evaluating attack mitigations and discusses other dimensions that could be integrated into the evaluation framework. The authors suggest implementing a proof-of-burn where the fee is captured in a commitment output sending to a provably unspendable output as a solution to the structure of the monetary strategy. However, they raise concerns about the lack of integration of the time uncertainty of honest use-cases in the analysis of the unconditional fee, making it hard to classify between quick and slow jamming.The proposal is practical and efficient, with additional fees being low enough to compensate jamming victims for the lost routing revenue. The authors provide a straightforward PoC implementation to demonstrate one approach to implementing the fee-related aspect of their proposal. They highlight issues with the chaining of unconditional fees and local reputation and suggest a need for a quantitative reputation mechanism to account for proportionality.The proposal will be discussed in the next spec meeting.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T10:33:05.941538+00:00