Time-Dilation Attacks on the Lightning Network published
Researchers Antoine Riard and Gleb Naumenko published 'Time-Dilation Attacks on the Lightning Network,' showing how delayed block information could be weaponized against Lightning users.
The paper described attacks in which an adversary eclipses a victim—isolating the node from honest Bitcoin peers—and deliberately delays its view of new blocks. Because Lightning security depends on reacting to on-chain events before timelocks expire, a sufficiently delayed node can lose the opportunity to defend its channel funds.
Riard and Naumenko outlined three theft paths and measured how eclipse conditions could affect both lightweight and full-node users. Their work did not show that Lightning had been broadly exploited in this way; it demonstrated a credible class of attacks and the limits of simple 'slow block' detection.
The research was important because it connected base-layer networking assumptions directly to second-layer financial security. It helped shift Lightning security analysis from purely channel-level logic toward the behavior of the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network underneath it.