Author: Anthony Towns 2020-02-27 12:06:56
Published on: 2020-02-27T12:06:56+00:00
In this email exchange, Rusty Russell discusses various proposals for improving the Lightning Network's handling of HTLC timeouts and attacks. He notes that he is not a fan of channel closes or peeling the onion, which can cause problems with routing across sidechains or privacy attacks, respectively. He proposes a simple attack involving routing many slow-but-not-slow-enough HTLCs from one node to another via different long paths, using up total channel capacity, and then leaving the HTLCs open until they time out, using up capacity from all nodes in the routes. He also discusses a proposal to fast-fail HTLCs and suggests that the grace period and penalty rate should depend on factors such as how many nodes have already been in the route and how many nodes there are still to go in the route. Ultimately, he concludes that further changes to the Lightning Network may require significant rewrites of the state machine and protocol.
Updated on: 2023-05-23T02:18:27.712835+00:00