Flood & Loot models systemic Lightning attack
Researchers Jona Harris and Aviv Zohar published 'Flood & Loot,' modeling an attack that could combine mass Lightning channel closures with Bitcoin block-space congestion.
The paper examined a systemic scenario in which an attacker opens channels with many Lightning nodes, later forces many channels on-chain at once, and exploits the resulting competition for limited Bitcoin block space. Victims that cannot confirm protective transactions in time can lose funds.
A central insight was that Lightning's security assumptions are partly economic: honest users need timely access to the base layer at fees high enough to beat adversarial transactions. The researchers also examined implementation differences and proposed mitigations.
Flood & Loot was a model and experimental analysis, not evidence of a real network-wide theft. Its historical importance is that it treated congestion itself as an attack surface for a second-layer protocol.