Lightning Systemic Attack

This repository contains the code that demonstrates the "Flood & Loot" attack on Bitcoin's Lightning Network, as described in this paper.

Project Structure

This repo is organized in the following way

ln
├── bin
│   ├── bitcoin-cli
│   ├── bitcoind
│   ├── eclair-cli
│   ├── eclair-node
│   ├── lightning-cli
│   ├── lightningd
│   ├── lightningd-evil (a modified implementation of c-lightning)
│   ├── lncli
│   └── lnd
├── conf (bitcoin/lightning conf files)
├── data (extracted data from lightning's mainnet)
├── py (python code)
├── sh (useful bash scripts)
├── simulations (full simulation script examples)
└── topologies (useful topology files. see commands_generator for more info)

Note: the bin directory is not part of this repo and should be created by the user. The existence of the bin directory and its content is assumed by some of the code (specifically, the commands_generator. see below).

Before starting you should set the following things:

1. The full path of the root directory is set in the bash variable named LN
2. LN/bin and LN/sh are added to PATH
3. LN/bin contains the executables (or links to them) as specified in the tree above

Assuming the root directory is in the user's home folder, these lines can be added to .bashrc:

export LN="$HOME/lightning-systemic-attack"
PATH="$LN/sh:$LN/bin:$PATH"

Where to start

The main entry point is probably the commands_generator module. It is responsible for generating simulations scripts, which include setting up nodes (lightning+bitcoin), opening channels, routing payments, executing the attack, dumping simulation data and more. All python code should run with py as the root python directory. For more details on how to use the commands_generator use the help menu:

python3 -m commands_generator.commands_generator --help

Nodes version

The latest bitcoin/lightning versions that were tested and work with our code:

Implementation	Version
bitcoin-core	0.19.0.1
c-lightning	0.8.1
lnd	0.9.2
eclair	0.4