Systematic Research on Technology and Challenges of Lightning Network

Abstract

The Lightning Network is a second layer payment protocol built on the Bitcoin network. Since the lightning network enables off-chain transactions, it improves the throughput of the Bitcoin platform and thus extends the scalability of the Bitcoin network. There have been many security, privacy and robustness problems occurred in the Lightning Network. Though there have been some works researched on these problems. It is still unclear what types of attack the Lightning network is facing and why these attacks occurred. In this work, We provide a systematic exposition of the Lightning network in terms of properties, security and privacy issues. We first present a detailed technical point of the Lightning Network to enable a more insightful analysis of Lightning Network's operating mechanism and find out the existing problems of the Lightning Network. Additionally, we analyze the security, privacy and robustness issues of the Lightning Network. Finally, we list the existing solutions and propose some possible solutions to the above mentioned issues.