Strategic Analysis of Griefing Attack in Lightning Network. (arXiv:2203.10533v2 [cs.CR] UPDATED)

Hashed Timelock Contract (\emph{HTLC}) in Lightning Network is susceptible to
a \emph{griefing attack}. An attacker can block several channels and stall
payments by mounting this attack. A state-of-the-art countermeasure, Hashed
Timelock Contract with Griefing-Penalty (\emph{HTLC-GP}) is found to work under
the classical assumption of participants being either honest or malicious but
fails for rational participants. To address the gap, we introduce a
game-theoretic model for analyzing griefing attacks in \emph{HTLC}. We use this
model to analyze griefing attacks in \emph{HTLC-GP} …

analysis attack lightning network