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Bribe & Fork: Cheap PCN Bribing Attacks via Forking Threat

Authors Zeta Avarikioti, Paweł Kędzior, Tomasz Lizurej, Tomasz Michalak

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  • Security and privacy → Systems security
Keywords
  • Blockchain
  • Payment Channels Networks
  • Timelock Bribing
  • Feather Forking

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Abstract

In this work, we reexamine the vulnerability of Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) to bribing attacks, where an adversary incentivizes blockchain miners to deliberately ignore a specific transaction to undermine the punishment mechanism of PCNs. While previous studies have posited a prohibitive cost for such attacks, we show that this cost can be dramatically reduced (to approximately $125), thereby increasing the likelihood of these attacks. To this end, we introduce Bribe & Fork, a modified bribing attack that leverages the threat of a so-called feather fork which we analyze with a novel formal model for the mining game with forking. We empirically analyze historical data of some real-world blockchain implementations to evaluate the scale of this cost reduction. Our findings shed more light on the potential vulnerability of PCNs and highlight the need for robust solutions.

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Zeta Avarikioti, Paweł Kędzior, Tomasz Lizurej, and Tomasz Michalak. Bribe & Fork: Cheap PCN Bribing Attacks via Forking Threat. In 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 316, pp. 11:1-11:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.11

Author Details

Zeta Avarikioti
  • Department of Informatics, TU Wien, Austria
Paweł Kędzior
  • University of Warsaw, Poland
Tomasz Lizurej
  • NASK, Warsaw, Poland
  • University of Warsaw, Poland
Tomasz Michalak
  • IDEAS NCBR, Warsaw, Poland
  • University of Warsaw, Poland

Funding

This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) through the SFB SpyCode project F8512-N, the project CoRaF (grant agreement ESP 68-N), and by the WWTF through the project 10.47379/ICT22045. This result is part of a project that received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe research and innovation programs (grant PROCONTRA-885666). This work was also partly supported by the National Science Centre, Poland, under research project No. 46339.

Acknowledgements

We thank Paul Harrenstein for his help in defining the model presented in this work.

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