This week’s brings two papers from the same team on the topic of preventing delay abuse within lightning p2p exchanges:

1. A trusted latency monitor service, for preventing abuse in a Lightning-based peer-to-peer exchange. link

2. Preventing transaction delays with a Lightning routing service, for preventing abuse in a Lightning-based peer-to-peer exchange. link

We covered this subject here and here.

Excerpt from the papers describing the delay attack:

An exchange transaction has two exchanging parties: one intermediate node (B) that placed an order, and one node (A) that accepts the order by making a route from A to B using one asset (X), and then back to A using the other asset (Y). Both parties have a step in the Lightning protocol where they can delay the decision on whether to execute or cancel the transaction, up to the time specified in a HTLC time-out. These time-outs can be quite large, because they have to allow operators of intermediate nodes to manually repair/replace anything (including hardware and internet connections) that might break in the middle of ongoing transactions. In the mean time, the exchange rate between X and Y will be changed, either in the advantage of A, or in the advantage of B.