Towards a Concurrent and Distributed Route Selection for Payment Channel Networks

Rohrer, Elias; Laß, Jann-Frederik; Tschorsch, Florian

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-67816-0_23

Cited by 26 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Most of the research in the area focuses on challenges concerning privacy, concurrency, and routing [28,29,30,31,32]. Concurrently to our work, the authors of [33] explore the Lightning Network's topology and also confirm that the network exhibits properties similar to small-world and scalefree networks.…”

Section: Related Worksupporting

confidence: 64%

Discharged Payment Channels: Quantifying the Lightning Network's Resilience to Topology-Based Attacks

Rohrer

Malliaris

Tschorsch

2019

2019 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW)

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The Lightning Network is the most widely used payment channel network (PCN) to date, making it an attractive attack surface for adversaries. In this paper, we analyze the Lightning Network's PCN topology and investigate its resilience towards random failures and targeted attacks. In particular, we introduce the notions of channel exhaustion and node isolation attacks and show that the Lightning Network is susceptible to these attacks. In a preliminary analysis, we confirm that the Lightning Network can be classified as a small-world and scalefree network. Based on these findings, we develop a series of strategies for targeted attacks and introduce metrics that allow us to quantify the adversary's advantage. Our results indicate that an attacker who is able to remove a certain number of nodes should follow a centrality-based strategy, while a resource-limited attacker who aims for high efficiency should employ a highest ranked minimum cut strategy.• We study the current state of the Lightning Network's PCN topology and assess its resilience to random failures and targeted attacks. • We systematize topology-based attacks against PCNs. • We introduce channel exhaustion and node isolation attacks as additional attack vectors. • We develop various adversarial strategies and quantify their prospects in terms of the adversarial success.

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Section: Related Worksupporting

confidence: 64%

Discharged Payment Channels: Quantifying the Lightning Network's Resilience to Topology-Based Attacks

Rohrer

Malliaris

Tschorsch

2019

2019 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW)

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“…Zhang et al [12] designed the Cheapay algorithm to find the cheapest available path with time and capacity constraints. A series of closely related works by Piatkivskyi et al [16], Rohrer et al [17] and Piatkivskyi et al [18] presented new mechanisms which divided a transaction and transmitted on different paths to resist the capacity constraints. Ren et al [14] proposed a new charging mechanism to maintain the balance of capacity, where the fee rate is defined as a reciprocal of the exponential function of the current capacity, so that more transactions can be processed successfully.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding the Benefit of Being Patient in Payment Channel Networks

Bai¹,

Xu²,

Wang³

2021

Preprint

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Scaling blockchain efficiency is crucial to its widespread usage in which the payment channel is one of the most prominent approaches. With payment channels and the network they construct, two users can move some transactions off-chain in a predetermined duration to avoid expensive and time-consuming on-chain settlements. Existing work is devoted to designing high-throughput payment channel networks (PCNs) or efficient PCN routing policies to reduce the fee charged by intermediate nodes. In this paper, we investigate the PCN routing from a different perspective by answering whether the routing fee of transactions can be saved through being a bit more patient. The key idea is to reorder the processing sequence of atomic transactions, other than to handle each of them separately and immediately. We present two mechanisms, one is periodic transaction processing assisted by a PCN broker and the other is purely strategic waiting. In the former, all the incoming transactions in a short time interval are processed collectively. We formulate an optimization model to minimize their total routing fee and derive the optimal permutation of processing transactions as well as the routing policy for each of them. A Shapley value based scheme is presented to redistribute the benefit of reordering among the transactions efficiently and fairly. In the latter, we model the waiting time of a strategic transaction on a single payment channel as the first passage time problem in queueing theory when the transaction value is higher than the edge capacity upon its arrival. By capturing the capacity dynamics, we are able to calculate the recursive expression of waiting time distribution that is useful to gauge a user's cost of patience. Experimental results manifest that our cost redistribution mechanism can effectively save routing fees for all the transactions, and the waiting time distribution coincides with the model well.

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“…A multihop transaction might fail if it encounters a channel with insufficient balance to process it on its path. Several routing approaches have been proposed for proper path selection [16], including source routing [18], max-flow-based approaches [6,20,22,[25][26][27], beacon-based routing with proactive aggregation of information [19], landmark-based routing [12], embedding-based routing [21], distance-vector routing [9], and ant routing [7]. Scheduling and congestion control have received little attention, with the notable exception of [22].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

State-Dependent Processing in Payment Channel Networks for Throughput Optimization

Papadis¹

2021

Preprint

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Payment channel networks (PCNs) have emerged as a scalability solution for blockchains built on the concept of a payment channel: a setting that allows two nodes to safely transact between themselves in high frequencies based on pre-committed peer-to-peer balances. Transaction requests in these networks may be declined because of unavailability of funds due to temporary uneven distribution of the channel balances. In this paper, we investigate how to alleviate unnecessary payment blockage via proper prioritization of the transaction execution order. Specifically, we consider the scheduling problem in PCNs: as transactions continuously arrive on both sides of a channel, nodes need to decide which ones to process and when in order to maximize their objective, which in our case is the channel throughput. We introduce a stochastic model to capture the dynamics of a payment channel under random arrivals, and propose that channels can hold incoming transactions in buffers up to some deadline in order to enable more elaborate processing decisions. We describe a policy that maximizes the channel success rate/throughput for uniform transaction requests of fixed amounts, both in the presence and absence of buffering capabilities, and formally prove its optimality. We also develop a discrete event simulator of a payment channel, and evaluate different heuristic scheduling policies in the more general heterogeneous amounts case, with the results showing superiority of the heuristic extension of our policy in this case as well. Our work opens the way for more formal research on improving PCN performance via joint consideration of routing and scheduling decisions.

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Towards a Concurrent and Distributed Route Selection for Payment Channel Networks

Cited by 26 publications

References 5 publications

Discharged Payment Channels: Quantifying the Lightning Network's Resilience to Topology-Based Attacks

Discharged Payment Channels: Quantifying the Lightning Network's Resilience to Topology-Based Attacks

Understanding the Benefit of Being Patient in Payment Channel Networks

State-Dependent Processing in Payment Channel Networks for Throughput Optimization

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