Can Antoine Riard’s Lightning Network Proposal Mitigate Channel Jamming Attacks?
By Shinobi The Lightning Network is a Layer 2 payment protocol that operates on top of Bitcoin, allowing users to make fast, cheap transactions.
One issue with the Lightning Network is the potential for "channel jamming," in which an attacker can route a payment through other nodes on the network and then refuse to finalize the payment, effectively blocking the use of those nodes for other transactions until the payment is refunded.
In order to mitigate this issue, Antoine Riard, a developer for the Lightning Network, has proposed the use of a Chaumian ecash token, a centralized token issued by a mint authority in a way that prevents the issuer from being able to connect the token to when it was issued.
The token would be used as a form of reputation proof, with nodes along the payment path verifying the validity of the token before forwarding the payment. If the payment is successful, a new token would be issued and returned to the sender.
If the payment fails, the token would be "burned," forcing the sender to acquire new tokens in order to route payments through those nodes again. The proposal aims to add an economic cost to channel jamming attacks, which currently only have a time cost. | 