Attacks in Distributed Routing Protocols in PCNs

Blockchain transactions can be made more scalable using Payment Channel Networks (PCNs), which do not require significant modifications to the distributed ledger algorithm. On the other hand, an onion protocol for anonymity and a locking mechanism to prevent race conditions are needed when routing a payment via several channels in a PCN. This method can be abused by adversaries to launch wormhole attacks. Prior research concentrated on source routing, which is unlikely to continue to be an effective routing strategy as these networks expand. We investigate the impact of attacks in PCNs that employ local knowledge-based routing algorithms. In these scenarios, malicious nodes can steal the benefits of interacting nodes by exchanging confidential information among themselves. We have analyzed the impact of wormhole attacks in the Swift algorithm, Speedy Murmurs, and Silent Whispers. Our experiments introduced an attack that uses a depth measure to arrange malicious nodes in various locations. We used attack gain, attack cost, and attack transaction ratio metrics to assess the attack's impact on routing algorithms. Our simulation-driven analysis demonstrates that placing a malicious node subsequent to a landmark node will raise the likelihood of an attack but at a higher cost. With high transaction volume, attack gain in Silent Whisper will decrease compared to Speedy Murmurs and Swift due to congestion. With 9.6% malicious nodes located at different locations, the average attack transaction ratio for all distributive routing algorithms is 41 %.