Abstract / Description of output
The high latency and low throughput of blockchain protocols constitute one of the fundamental barriers for their wider adoption. Overlay protocols, notably the lightning network, have been touted as the most viable direction for rectifying this in practice. In this work we present for the first time a full formalisation and security analysis of the lightning network in the (global) universal composition setting that leverages a global ledger functionality, for which realisability by the Bitcoin blockchain protocol has been demonstrated in previous work [Badertscher et al., Crypto’17]. As a result, our treatment delineates exactly how the security guarantees of the protocol depend on the properties of the underlying ledger and the frequent availability of the protocol participants. Moreover, we provide a complete and modular description of the core of the lightning protocol that highlights precisely its dependency to under-lying basic cryptographic primitives such as digital signatures, pseudorandom functions, identity-based signatures and a less common two-party primitive, which we term a combined digital signature, that were originally hidden within the lightning protocol’s implementation.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | 2020 IEEE 33rd Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF) |
Publisher | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers |
Pages | 334-349 |
Number of pages | 16 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-7281-6572-1 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-1-7281-6573-8 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 4 Aug 2020 |
Event | 33rd IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium - Virtual Conference Duration: 22 Jun 2020 → 25 Jun 2020 https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/CSF2020/ |
Publication series
Name | |
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Publisher | IEEE |
ISSN (Print) | 1940-1434 |
ISSN (Electronic) | 2374-8303 |
Symposium
Symposium | 33rd IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium |
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Abbreviated title | CSF 2020 |
City | Virtual Conference |
Period | 22/06/20 → 25/06/20 |
Internet address |