What is it about?
Uncovering a new denial-of-service (DoS) attack that exploits the routing mechanism to attract and hijack Off-chain transactions using a small number of channels owned by the attacker. Through our experiments, just five new channels (costing less than 1$) are enough to draw the majority (55% — 75%) of the traffic between nodes in the Lightning network. With 30 channels the attacker will hijack more than 80% of all transfers.
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Photo by Steve Medwin on Unsplash
Why is it important?
We consider routing hijacks an important threat to incentive-based networks, and off-chain networks in particular. If relaying nodes are to gain from participating, they will try to extract fees, and attackers that are willing to forgo these fees will be able to attract traffic. The routing mechanisms could be significantly improved, and this study helps to understand how.
Perspectives
This paper shows that the route hijacking attack is very severe in today's Lightning Network, which is the largest off-chain network today. I think that proper research toward understanding the root causes of this attack should be in high priority, and this paper lies the building blocks for it.
Saar Tochner
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Route Hijacking and DoS in Off-Chain Networks, October 2020, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3419614.3423253.
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