Related papers: Discharged Payment Channels: Quantifying the Light…
Susceptibility of scale free Power Law (PL) networks to attacks has been traditionally studied in the context of what may be termed as {\em instantaneous attacks}, where a randomly selected set of nodes and edges are deleted while the…
Lightning Network (LN) is a widely-used network of payment channels enabling faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions. In this paper, we outline three ways an attacker can steal funds from honest LN users. The attacks require dilating the…
A central issue in complex networks is tolerance to random failures and intentional attacks. Current literature emphasizes the dichotomy between networks with a power-law node connectivity distribution, which are robust to random failures…
Off-chain transaction channels represent one of the leading techniques to scale the transaction throughput in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. They allow multiple agents to route payments through one another. So far, the topology and…
Complex socioeconomic networks such as information, finance and even terrorist networks need resilience to cascades - to prevent the failure of a single node from causing a far-reaching domino effect. We show that terrorist and guerrilla…
The behavior of complex networks under attack depends strongly on the specific attack scenario. Of special interest are scale-free networks, which are usually seen as robust under random failure or attack but appear to be especially…
Payment channel networks are an approach to improve the scalability of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Because payment channel networks are used for transfer of financial value, their security in the presence of adversarial participants…
Payment networks, also known as channels, are a most promising solution to the throughput problem of cryptocurrencies. In this paper we study the design of capital-efficient payment networks, offline as well as online variants. We want to…
It has been known that heterogeneous networks are vulnerable to the intentional removal of a small fraction of highly connected or loaded nodes, which implies that, to protect a network effectively, a few important nodes should be allocated…
Peer to peer systems are the networks consisting of a group of nodes possible to be as wide as the Internet. These networks are required of evaluation mechanisms and distributed control and configurations, so each peer will be able to…
The vulnerability of networks to targeted attacks is an issue of widespread interest for policymakers, military strategists, network engineers and systems biologists alike. Current approaches to circumvent targeted attacks seek to increase…
Lightning Network (LN) is designed to amend the scalability and privacy issues of Bitcoin. It's a payment channel network where Bitcoin transactions are issued off chain, onion routed through a private payment path with the aim to settle…
In practice, since many communication networks are huge in scale, or complicated in structure, or even dynamic, the predesigned linear network codes based on the network topology is impossible even if the topological structure is known.…
Payment channels were introduced to solve various eminent cryptocurrency scalability issues. Multiple payment channels build a network on top of a blockchain, the so-called layer 2. In this work, we analyze payment networks through the lens…
The behavior of complex networks under failure or attack depends strongly on the specific scenario. Of special interest are scale-free networks, which are usually seen as robust under random failure but appear to be especially vulnerable to…
The Lightning Network is a so-called second-layer technology built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain to provide "off-chain" fast payment channels between users, which means that not all transactions are settled and stored on the main…
We study a random process over graphs inspired by the way payments are executed in the Lightning Network, the main layer-two solution on top of Bitcoin. We first prove almost tight upper and lower bounds on the time it takes for a payment…
With increasingly ambitious initiatives such as GENI and FIND that seek to design the future Internet, it becomes imperative to define the characteristics of robust topologies, and build future networks optimized for robustness. This paper…
Making a payment in a privacy-aware payment channel network is achieved by trying several payment paths until one succeeds. With a large network, such as the Lightning Network, a completion of a single payment can take up to several…
In this work we use formal verification to prove that the Lightning Network (LN), the most prominent scaling technique for Bitcoin, always safeguards the funds of honest users. We provide a custom implementation of (a simplification of) LN,…