Researchers Uncover Bitcoin ‘Attack’ That Could Slow or Stop Lightning Payments

As CoinDesk reported, “The bitcoin lightning network could be vulnerable to a simple and disruptive attack, according to a recent research paper.

“Written by Saar Tochner, Aviv Zohar, and Stefan Schmid, the paper describes a denial-of-service (DoS) attack that could be used to slow down or even stop a huge percentage of payments on the network and, although the behavior hasn’t been seen in the wild and lightning’s technology is still in-progress, it’s considered a major flaw in the network as it stands today. The paper, entitled ‘Hijacking Routes in Payment Networks,’ was published in mid-September.

“Tochner and Zohar both hail from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem while Schmid works at the University of Vienna.

“’The attack allows for a disruption of payments on the lightning network,’ said Zohar.

“This is possible because each lightning network payment is passed across a network of nodes in order to reach its destination. If one of these middle nodes is a bad actor it can slow the payment down rather than swiftly pass along the payment as it’s supposed to.

“What’s more, it currently doesn’t take much to execute the denial of service attack, according to Zohar…”

Continue to read the full report at CoinDesk.

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