Author: Antoine Riard 2022-12-06 04:27:12
Published on: 2022-12-06T04:27:12+00:00
The conversation between Antoine and Joost revolves around the issue of preventing jamming attacks on the Lightning Network. They discuss various solutions to make routing hops "jamming safe" by defining the goals, either putting a high cost on the attacker or guaranteeing routing fees incomes to the routing hop. Circuitbreaker is one such solution that adds new "dynamic" HTLC slot limits and rate-limits the HTLCs forwards based on incoming sources. The more nodes run it, the harder it becomes for attackers to attack. However, the implementation of circuitbreaker carries some downsides, such as lowering the cost for jamming low-value slots and making simple payments from lambda users more vulnerable. Joost argues that an attacker can't do much with a severely limited channel and would need many more to achieve the same effect, making it a lot harder than it currently is. There is also a discussion about the mode of queuing HTLCs as a congestion control mechanism and scheduling efficient HTLC traffic. They conclude that applying congestion control by holding HTLCs may wake up everyone along the path back to the attacker and move them to apply congestion control too.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T10:56:27.522834+00:00