Author: Bastien TEINTURIER 2020-06-20 08:54:03
Published on: 2020-06-20T08:54:03+00:00
In this conversation, Bastien and David A. Harding discuss the potential for a blind CPFP carve-out trick in Bitcoin's Lightning Network. They determine that an attacker broadcasting an outdated transaction would shoot themselves in the foot, as revocation paths could be claimed when seeing the transaction in a block, resulting in the loss of all channel funds since the attacker's outputs would be CSV-locked. However, the only way for the honest counterparty to relay the blind child is if it already has the parent transaction, making the blind CPFP carve-out quite hard in practice. In the worst-case scenario where most miners' mempools contain the attacker's transaction and the rest of the network's mempools contains the honest participant's transaction, there isn't much that can be done. The only solution is to avoid being in that situation by having a foot in miners' mempools. Bastien suggests that off-chain nodes invest in running nodes in mining pools to ensure that they learn about attackers' transactions and can potentially share discovered preimages with the network off-chain. This may help prevent future attacks on the Lightning Network.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T00:36:00.547205+00:00