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An Empirical Analysis of Privacy in the Lightning Network

Yousaf, H; Kappos, G; Piotrowska, A; Kanjalkar, S; Delgado-Segura, S; Miller, A; Meiklejohn, S; (2021) An Empirical Analysis of Privacy in the Lightning Network. In: Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12674. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg: Online conference. Green open access

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Abstract

Payment channel networks, and the Lightning Network in particular, seem to offer a solution to the lack of scalability and privacy offered by Bitcoin and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Previous research has focused on the scalability, availability, and crypto-economics of the Lightning Network, but relatively little attention has been paid to exploring the level of privacy it achieves in practice. This paper presents a thorough analysis of the privacy offered by the Lightning Network, by presenting several attacks that exploit publicly available information about the network in order to learn information that is designed to be kept secret, such as how many coins a node has available or who the sender and recipient are in a payment routed through the network.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: An Empirical Analysis of Privacy in the Lightning Network
Event: Financial Cryptography and Data Security
Dates: 01 March 2021 - 05 February 2021
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-64322-8_8
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64322-8_8
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10121448
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