Author: Antoine Riard 2020-06-07 22:31:54
Published on: 2020-06-07T22:31:54+00:00
The research presented in the email thread discusses a time-dilation attack on concurrent transactions that use timelocks. The attack can be performed with just one channel to the victim, which could be an offchain-to-onchain swap service or any node connected to the victim. Even running a Bitcoin full node over Tor is risky, so the suggestion is to run the Bitcoin node on clearnet and the Lightning node over Tor and connect to random Bitcoin full nodes or Electrum servers. A mitigation for the background process would be to sleep for 20 minutes and then do `bitcoin-cli addnode ${BITCOINNODE} onetry`. However, it is uncertain how to get `${BITCOINNODE}` that is not part of the eclipsing attacker. The victim could check that the absolute timelocks seem very far in the future relative to its own view of the current block height to increase failure rates.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T02:11:57.743499+00:00