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Payment Censorship in the Lightning Network Despite Encrypted Communication

Authors Charmaine Ndolo , Florian Tschorsch

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Author Details

Charmaine Ndolo
  • Dresden University of Technology, Germany
Florian Tschorsch
  • Dresden University of Technology, Germany

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Charmaine Ndolo and Florian Tschorsch. Payment Censorship in the Lightning Network Despite Encrypted Communication. In 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 316, pp. 12:1-12:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.12

Abstract

The Lightning network (LN) offers a solution to Bitcoin’s scalability limitations by providing fast and private off-chain payments. In addition to the LN’s long known application-level centralisation, recent work has highlighted its centralisation at the network-level which makes it vulnerable to attacks on privacy by malicious actors. In this work, we explore the LN’s susceptibility to censorship by a network-level actor such as a malicious autonomous system. We show that a network-level actor can identify and censor all payments routed via their network by just examining the packet headers. Our results indicate that it is viable to accurately identify LN messages despite the fact that all inter-peer communication is end-to-end encrypted. Additionally, we describe how a network-level observer can determine a node’s role in a payment path based on timing, direction of flow and message type, and demonstrate the approach’s feasibility using experiments in a live instance of the network. Simulations of the attack on a snapshot of the Lightning mainnet suggest that the impact of the attack varies from mild to potentially dramatic depending on the adversary and type of payments that are censored. We analyse countermeasures the network can implement and come to the conclusion that an adequate solution comprises constant message sizes as well as dummy traffic.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Networks → Network privacy and anonymity
  • Security and privacy → Software and application security
  • Security and privacy → Distributed systems security
Keywords
  • Lightning network
  • payment channel networks
  • censorship resistance

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