Author: Gloria Zhao 2021-04-26 23:06:34
Published on: 2021-04-26T23:06:34+00:00
Gloria, a Bitcoin developer, has expressed interest in joining a discussion about tx-relay and mempool acceptance rules of the base layer that have caused major security and operational concerns for Lightning and other Bitcoin second-layers. Due to travel restrictions, an in-person workshop cannot be held, but a series of one or more IRC meetings is proposed. The discussion will cover four topics: package relay design, deprecation of opt-in RBF toward full-RBF, guidelines about coordinated cross-layers security disclosures, and guidelines about L2 protocols onchain security design. The primary goal is to understand the simplest version of package relay sufficient to support transaction relay assumptions made by L2 applications. Gloria believes that if a parent + child package covers the vast majority of cases and a package limit of 2 is considered acceptable, it could simplify things quite a bit. She also notes that package relay and sponsorship (or other fee-bumping primitive) should be separate discussions.For the purpose of creating a stable API/set of assumptions between layers, Gloria recommends being as concrete as possible and providing test vectors. She suggests a simple description of mempool contents + p2p messages sent, along with pubkeys + transaction hex to help TDD for specific L2 attacks. She also suggests exposing a configurable RPC to test a range of scenarios.The goals of the discussion are to reach technical consensus, establish a security incident response policy, and establish a philosophy design and associated documentations (BIPs, best practices, ...). The timeline includes a two-week consultation period to submit other topics related to tx-relay or mempools improvements towards L2s before proposing a finalized scope and agenda. The IRC meetings will be held in late May to early June. Antoine Riard, who initiated the discussion, has started a collection of documents to assist this workshop. However, Gloria notes that rules around tx-relay and mempool acceptances are non-normative, non-reliable, and lack documentation. L2 projects maintainers should be ready to upgrade their protocols in emergency in coordination with base layers developers.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T20:29:05.967976+00:00