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How Lightning’s Routing Diminishes its Anonymity

Authors:

Satwik Prabhu Kumble,

Stefanie RoosAuthors Info & Claims

ARES '21: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security

Article No.: 13, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3465481.3465761

Published: 17 August 2021 Publication History

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Abstract

Lightning, the prevailing solution to Bitcoin’s scalability issue, uses onion routing to hide senders and recipients of payments. Yet, the path between the sender and the recipient along which payments are routed is selected such that it is short, cost efficient, and fast. The low degree of randomness in the path selection entails that anonymity sets are small. However, quantifying the anonymity provided by Lightning is challenging due to the existence of multiple implementations that differ with regard to the path selection algorithm and exist in parallel within the network. In this paper, we propose a general method allowing a local internal attacker to determine sender and recipient anonymity sets. Based on an in-depth code review of three Lightning implementations, we analyze how an adversary can predict the sender and the recipient of a multi-hop transaction. Our simulations indicate that only one adversarial node on a payment path uniquely identifies at least one of sender and recipient for around 70% of the transactions observed by the adversary. Moreover, multiple colluding attackers can almost always identify sender and receiver uniquely.

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Cited By

Aumayr LCeylan EKopyciok YMaffei MMoreno-Sanchez PSalem ISchmid S(2024)Optimizing Virtual Payment Channel Establishment in the Face of On-Path Adversaries2024 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking)10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619889(1-10)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619889
Valko DKudenko D(2024)Reducing CO2 emissions in a peer-to-peer distributed payment networkComputer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110297243:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110297
von Arx TTran MVanbever L(2023)Revelio: A Network-Level Privacy Attack in the Lightning Network2023 IEEE 8th European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)10.1109/EuroSP57164.2023.00060(942-957)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSP57164.2023.00060
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cover image ACM Other conferences

ARES '21: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security

August 2021

1447 pages

ISBN:9781450390514

DOI:10.1145/3465481

Copyright © 2021 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 August 2021

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ARES 2021

ARES 2021: The 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security

August 17 - 20, 2021

Vienna, Austria

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Overall Acceptance Rate 228 of 451 submissions, 51%

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Cited By

Aumayr LCeylan EKopyciok YMaffei MMoreno-Sanchez PSalem ISchmid S(2024)Optimizing Virtual Payment Channel Establishment in the Face of On-Path Adversaries2024 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking)10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619889(1-10)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619889
Valko DKudenko D(2024)Reducing CO2 emissions in a peer-to-peer distributed payment networkComputer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110297243:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110297
von Arx TTran MVanbever L(2023)Revelio: A Network-Level Privacy Attack in the Lightning Network2023 IEEE 8th European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)10.1109/EuroSP57164.2023.00060(942-957)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSP57164.2023.00060
Ndolo CTschorsch F(2023)On the (Not So) Surprising Impact of Multi-Path Payments on Performance And Privacy in the Lightning NetworkComputer Security. ESORICS 2023 International Workshops10.1007/978-3-031-54204-6_25(411-427)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-54204-6_25
Azzolini DRiguzzi F(2022)Probabilistic Logic Models for the Lightning NetworkCryptography10.3390/cryptography60200296:2(29)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography6020029

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