Author: Antoine Riard 2020-04-22 19:03:29
Published on: 2020-04-22T19:03:29+00:00
The discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list revolves around a potential attack on the Lightning Network. Matt Corallo raises concerns about a counterparty (C) being able to spend an HTLC using the preimage with a low-fee, RBF-disabled transaction if B broadcasts the commitment transaction. David A. Harding suggests re-implementing something like a BIP61 reject message with an extension that returns the txids of any conflicts so that nodes can reply with "rejected: code 123: conflicts with txid 0123...cdef". This would allow Bob to get the pinned transaction, parse out its preimage, and resolve the HTLC. However, there are concerns about the reliability of this approach, as well as potential DoS vectors, such as an attacker creating a local conflict in a mempool or doing tx-relay topology discovery to blind tx-relay peers. Overall, p2p/mempool hardening measures will make attacks harder but may not erase them completely, and it is important to avoid tying the security model of Lightning to a specific p2p topology.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T00:34:53.687229+00:00