In this work, we reexamine the vulnerability of Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) to bribing attacks, where an adversary incentivizes blockchain miners to deliberately ignore a specific transaction to undermine the punishment mechanism of PCNs. While previous studies have posited a prohibitive cost for such attacks, we show that this cost can be dramatically reduced (to approximately $125), thereby increasing the likelihood of these attacks. To this end, we introduce Bribe & Fork, a modified bribing attack that leverages the threat of a so-called feather fork which we analyze with a novel formal model for the mining game with forking. We empirically analyze historical data of some real-world blockchain implementations to evaluate the scale of this cost reduction. Our findings shed more light on the potential vulnerability of PCNs and highlight the need for robust solutions.

Off-chain channel networks are one of the most promising technologies for dealing with blockchain scalability and delayed finality issues. Parties connected within such networks can send coins to each other without interacting with the blockchain. Moreover, these payments can be "routed" over the network. Thanks to this, even the parties that do not have a channel in common can perform payments between each other with the help of intermediaries. In this paper, we introduce a new notion that we call Non-Atomic Payment Splitting (NAPS) protocols that allow the intermediaries in the network to split the payments recursively into several subpayments in such a way that the payment can be successful "partially" (i.e. not all the requested amount may be transferred). This contrasts with the existing splitting techniques that are "atomic" in that they did not allow such partial payments (we compare the "atomic" and "non-atomic" approaches in the paper). We define NAPS formally and then present a protocol that we call "EthNA", that satisfies this definition. EthNA is based on very simple and efficient cryptographic tools; in particular, it does not use expensive cryptographic primitives. We implement a simple variant of EthNA in Solidity and provide some benchmarks. We also report on some experiments with routing using EthNA.