Securing Lightning Channels against Rational Miners
Lukas Aumayr, Zeta Avarikioti, Matteo Maffei, Subhra Mazumdar · 2024
Payment channel networks (e.g., the Lightning Network in Bitcoin) constitute one of the most popular scalability solutions for blockchains. Their safety relies on parties being online to detect fraud attempts on-chain and being able to timely react by publishing certain transactions on-chain. However, a cheating party may bribe miners in order to censor those transactions, resulting in loss of funds for the cheated party: these attacks are known in the literature as timelock bribing attacks. In this work, we present the first channel construction that does not require parties to be online and, at the same time, is resistant to timelock bribing attacks.