Author: Jim Posen 2018-04-15 18:37:05
Published on: 2018-04-15T18:37:05+00:00
The discussion revolves around the potential for denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on the Lightning Network and the use of symmetric or asymmetric delays in commitment transactions as a mitigation strategy. Jimpo argues that an attacker could achieve the same outcome with asymmetric delays by refusing to participate in a mutual close, forcing the other party to close on-chain. This results in wasting the time-value of the other party's money in the channel, but the attacker loses access to some funds for some time too. ZmnSCPxj agrees that this is a concern and proposes delaying the outputs of the holding commitment transaction instead of making it symmetrical. This way, the attacker can still disrupt the network by misbehaving and forcing the other side to push its commitment transaction or accepting a channel and failing to forward any payment over it. However, this attack is somewhat more passive than the previous attack under a symmetrical delay commitment transaction scheme.
Updated on: 2023-05-24T23:15:21.226520+00:00