Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

FlexiPCN: Flexible Payment Channel Network

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2023 International Workshops (FC 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13953))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 302 Accesses

Abstract

Payment Channel Network (PCN) is a widely recognized and effective off-chain solution used to reduce on-chain operational costs. PCN is designed to address the scalability challenge and throughput issues in permissionless blockchains. Though transaction throughput is improved, many issues remain, like no flexibility, channel exhaustion, poor sustainability, etc. A separate deposit is required for each payment channel between two users, which locks a substantial amount of coins for a long period of time. Therefore, the flexibility to move these locked coins across channels is impossible through off-chain. Moreover, the channels get exhausted due to unbalanced (unidirectional) transfer. This causes the channel to become unsustainable (dead) until the PCN is rebalanced. This work presents a novel payment protocol called Flexible Payment Channel Networks (FlexiPCN), which allows users to deposit coins per user rather than per channel. So, users can move coins flexibly from one channel to another without the help of the blockchain or setting the cycle off-chain. FlexiPCN has been proven to be secure under the Universal Composability framework.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Adam Back. “HashCash: A popular PoW system”. First announced in March 1997.

  2. 2.

    Stress Test Prepares VisaNet for the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. https://www.visa.com/blogarchives/us/2013/10/10/stress-test-prepares-visanet-for-the-most-wonderful-time-of-the-year/index.html.

  3. 3.

    https://lightning.engineering/loop/.

  4. 4.

    https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hash_Time_Locked_Contracts.

  5. 5.

    ETLC: Elliptic Curve based Time-Lock Contract [24].

References

  1. Raiden Network: Fast, cheap, scalable token transfers for Ethereum (2018). https://raiden.network/

  2. Canetti, R.: Universally composable security: a new paradigm for cryptographic protocols. In: Proceedings 42nd IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, pp. 136–145. IEEE (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Croman, K., et al.: On scaling decentralized blockchains. In: Clark, J., Meiklejohn, S., Ryan, P.Y.A., Wallach, D., Brenner, M., Rohloff, K. (eds.) FC 2016. LNCS, vol. 9604, pp. 106–125. Springer, Heidelberg (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_8

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  4. Dotan, M., Pignolet, Y.A., Schmid, S., Tochner, S., Zohar, A.: SOK: cryptocurrency networking context, state-of-the-art, challenges. In: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, pp. 1–13 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Ge, Z., Zhang, Y., Long, Y., Gu, D.: Shaduf: non-cycle payment channel rebalancing. In: 29th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 2022, San Diego, California, USA (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Gudgeon, L., Moreno-Sanchez, P., Roos, S., McCorry, P., Gervais, A.: SoK: layer-two blockchain protocols. In: Bonneau, J., Heninger, N. (eds.) FC 2020. LNCS, vol. 12059, pp. 201–226. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51280-4_12

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  7. Harris, J., Zohar, A.: Flood & loot: a systemic attack on the lightning network. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies, pp. 202–213 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Herrera-Joancomartí, J., Navarro-Arribas, G., Ranchal-Pedrosa, A., Pérez-Solà, C., Garcia-Alfaro, J.: On the difficulty of hiding the balance of lightning network channels. In: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 602–612 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Hong, Z., Guo, S., Zhang, R., Li, P., Zhan, Y., Chen, W.: Cycle: sustainable off-chain payment channel network with asynchronous rebalancing. In: 2022 52nd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), pp. 41–53. IEEE (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Khalil, R., Gervais, A.: Revive: rebalancing off-blockchain payment networks. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS, Dallas, TX, USA, pp. 439–453 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Li, P., Miyazaki, T., Zhou, W.: Secure balance planning of off-blockchain payment channel networks. In: IEEE INFOCOM 2020-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, pp. 1728–1737. IEEE (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Malavolta, G., Moreno-Sanchez, P., Kate, A., Maffei, M., Ravi, S.: Concurrency and privacy with payment-channel networks. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 455–471 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Malavolta, G., Moreno-Sanchez, P., Schneidewind, C., Kate, A., Maffei, M.: Anonymous multi-hop locks for blockchain scalability and interoperability. In: 26th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 2019, San Diego, California, USA (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Mavroudis, V., Wüst, K., Dhar, A., Kostiainen, K., Capkun, S.: Snappy: Fast on-chain payments with practical collaterals. arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.01278 (2020)

  15. Mizrahi, A., Zohar, A.: Congestion attacks in payment channel networks. In: Borisov, N., Diaz, C. (eds.) FC 2021. LNCS, vol. 12675, pp. 170–188. Springer, Heidelberg (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_9

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  16. Mohanty, S.K., Tripathy, S.: n-htlc: Neo hashed time-lock commitment to defend against wormhole attack in payment channel networks. Comput. Secur. 106, 102291 (2021)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Mohanty, S.K., Tripathy, S.: Siovchain: time-lock contract based privacy-preserving data sharing in siov. IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst. 23(12), 24071–24082 (2022)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system (2008). http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

  19. Pérez-Solà, C., Ranchal-Pedrosa, A., Herrera-Joancomartí, J., Navarro-Arribas, G., Garcia-Alfaro, J.: LockDown: balance availability attack against lightning network channels. In: Bonneau, J., Heninger, N. (eds.) FC 2020. LNCS, vol. 12059, pp. 245–263. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51280-4_14

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  20. Poon, J., Dryja, T.: The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments (2016). https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

  21. Rohrer, E., Malliaris, J., Tschorsch, F.: Discharged payment channels: quantifying the lightning network’s resilience to topology-based attacks. In: 2019 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS &PW), pp. 347–356. IEEE (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Rohrer, E., Tschorsch, F.: Counting down thunder: timing attacks on privacy in payment channel networks. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies, pp. 214–227 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Szabo, N.: The idea of smart contracts. Nick Szabo’s papers and concise tutorials 6(1), 199 (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Tripathy, S., Mohanty, S.K.: MAPPCN: multi-hop anonymous and privacy-preserving payment channel network. In: Bernhard, M., et al. (eds.) FC 2020. LNCS, vol. 12063, pp. 481–495. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54455-3_34

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  25. Wood, G., et al.: Ethereum: a secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger (2014). https://ethereum.github.io/yellowpaper/paper.pdf

Download references

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge the Ministry of Education (MoE), Government of India for providing fellowship under Ph.D. program to complete this work.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Bihta, Patna, 801106, India

    Susil Kumar Mohanty & Somanath Tripathy

Authors
  1. Susil Kumar Mohanty
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Somanath Tripathy
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Somanath Tripathy .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Western University, London, ON, Canada

    Aleksander Essex

  2. Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

    Shin'ichiro Matsuo

  3. IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Oksana Kulyk

  4. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Lewis Gudgeon

  5. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Ariah Klages-Mundt

  6. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Daniel Perez

  7. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Sam Werner

  8. Stirling University, Stirling, UK

    Andrea Bracciali

  9. University College London, London, UK

    Geoff Goodell

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2024 International Financial Cryptography Association

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Mohanty, S.K., Tripathy, S. (2024). FlexiPCN: Flexible Payment Channel Network. In: Essex, A., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2023 International Workshops. FC 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13953. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48806-1_26

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48806-1_26

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-48805-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-48806-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation