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Avoiding Deadlocks in Payment Channel Networks

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Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology (DPM 2018, CBT 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11025))

Abstract

Payment transaction channels are one of the main proposed approaches to scaling cryptocurrency payment systems. Recent work by Malavolta et al. [7] has shown that the privacy of the protocol may conflict with its concurrent nature and may lead to deadlocks. In this paper we ask the natural question: can payments in routing networks be routed so as to avoid deadlocks altogether? Our results show that it is in general NP-complete to determine whether a deadlock-free routing exists in a given payment graph. On the other hand, Given some fixed routing, we propose another way to resolve the problem of deadlocks. We offer a modification of the protocols in lightning network and in Fulgor [7] that pre-locks edges in an order that guarantees progress, while still maintaining the protocol’s privacy requirements.

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Hebrew University of Jersualem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Shira Werman & Aviv Zohar

Authors
  1. Shira Werman
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  2. Aviv Zohar
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shira Werman .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Télécom SudParis, Evry, France

    Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro

  2. Enginyeria de la Informacio I de les Com, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain

    Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí

  3. Università degli Studi di Milano, Crema, Italy

    Giovanni Livraga

  4. Universidad de Málaga, Málaga, Spain

    Ruben Rios

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Werman, S., Zohar, A. (2018). Avoiding Deadlocks in Payment Channel Networks. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Herrera-Joancomartí, J., Livraga, G., Rios, R. (eds) Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology. DPM CBT 2018 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11025. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00305-0_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00305-0_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-00304-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-00305-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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