FAKEY: Fake Hashed Key Attack on Payment Channel Networks

Although blockchain’s immutability and decentralized capabilities make monetary transactions more secure than ever, its inherent scalability problem hinders its utilization in myriad applications. Payment channel networks (PCNs), one of the prominent solutions to blockchain’s scalability issue, reduce the load on the blockchain by performing the transactions offchain. However, malicious PCN participants can delay the block delivery by slightly misbehaving in the initialization phase. In this work, we introduce FAKEY, a fake hashed key-based attack on PCN that can block up a whole set of channels carrying a transaction for a certain period (via collateral lock), depending on the hashed timelock contract (HTLCs) in the attacked payment path. For the targeted attack setup, the effect of the FAKEY is more severe, as PCN throughput can be reduced significantly. Moreover, the attacker can gain direct monetary benefit by carefully choosing one or more victim nodes. We utilize one of the state-of-the-art PCN simulators, PCN sim, to perform multiple experiments with different attack strategies and calculate profit accumulation scenarios. To demonstrate the attack impacts in detail, we perform a couple of case studies using the simulator. Finally, to validate the attack effect and adversarial benefits in a real-world PCN, we utilize the Bitcoin Lightning Network snapshots spanning over a period of 18 months and calculate the exact monetary impact in satoshi units.