Author: Anthony Towns 2015-12-16 06:30:23
Published on: 2015-12-16T06:30:23+00:00
In an email thread from October 2015, Anthony Towns discussed the use of public key cryptography in lightning and identified three potential uses: routing keys for constructing the onion, anchor keys for spending the anchor transaction and signing commitment transactions, and p2p keys for establishing a shared secret when talking to a node. According to Towns, separate keys for spending the anchor and spending the commitments are necessary, with secure random signing parameters chosen for the anchor keys being particularly important. The commitment keys may not actually be used if the channel is closed cooperatively, so having a collection of these could potentially improve privacy. However, having too many commitment keys could make enforcement of revoked commitments difficult. Both parties must know the commitment (public) keys to construct and validate the p2sh addresses. Lastly, p2p keys are used to avoid p2p communications being available to someone else and can either be different for every connection or just one for the lightning instance.
Updated on: 2023-05-18T15:29:44.043558+00:00