{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/strategic-analysis-to-defend-against-griefing","title":"Strategic Analysis of Griefing Attack in Lightning Network","arxiv_id":"2203.10533","date":"2022-03-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Subhra Mazumdar","Prabal Banerjee","Abhinandan Sinha","Sushmita Ruj","Bimal Roy"],"abstract":"Hashed Timelock Contract (HTLC) in Lightning Network is susceptible to a 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 (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 HTLC. We use this model to analyze griefing attacks in HTLC-GP and conjecture that it is impossible to design an efficient protocol that will penalize a malicious participant with the current Bitcoin scripting system. We study the impact of the penalty on the cost of mounting the attack and observe that HTLC-GP is weakly effective in disincentivizing the attacker in certain conditions. To further increase the cost of attack, we introduce the concept of \\emph{guaranteed minimum compensation}, denoted as $\\zeta$, and modify HTLC-GP into $\\textrm{HTLC-GP}^{\\zeta}$. By experimenting on several instances of Lightning Network, we observe that the total coins locked in the network drops to $28\\%$ for $\\textrm{HTLC-GP}^{\\zeta}$, unlike in HTLC-GP where total coins locked does not drop below $40\\%$. These results justify that $\\textrm{HTLC-GP}^{\\zeta}$ is better than HTLC-GP to counter griefing attacks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.10533v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.10533v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"strategic-analysis-to-defend-against-griefing","repo_url":"https://github.com/subhramazumdar/strategic_analysis_griefing","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}