Author: Antoine Riard 2023-01-31 05:43:52
Published on: 2023-01-31T05:43:52+00:00
During a recent Lightning Network (LN) meeting, participants discussed how to address channel jamming attacks on the network. Various solutions were proposed, including a taproot tree for all HTLCs and real-time monitoring of congestion rates and outcome results of HTLC forwarding. The group also discussed upgrading mechanisms and the need for relaying nodes to initially upgrade but not enforce the feature. They also talked about the development of Staking Credentials and a reputation system for the LN specification group.The Lightning Network (LN) community discussed two important topics in their recent meeting. First, they talked about the possibility of a network upgrade to improve the LN protocol, which would require input from wallets, designers, and application developers. Second, they discussed the draft proposal for upfront fees as a way to mitigate jamming attacks on the network. The proposed upfront fee is expressed as a ppm of a channel's success-case fees and charged on the outgoing link of a route. However, there were concerns about the simplicity of the approach and the possible misalignment of incentives between nodes along the route.The discussion on upfront fees also touched on the potential interaction with future protocol changes, such as inbound fees and negative fees. The group considered more complicated approaches that include a "proof of forward" secret in the next node's onion or a taproot tree for all HTLCs, but acknowledged the desire to keep the solution as simple as possible. Additionally, the group discussed spamming in the network and whether a capped upfront fee solution (e.g., 1 sat per hop) would be sufficient for the current state of the network.The group provided an update on the Circuit Breaker, which now has a UI and allows node operators to address spamming of their nodes by providing them with information about payment failures. The Circuit Breaker is pushing in the same direction as the reputation scheme in the LSP specification group, which aims to provide standard metrics about what makes a node good/bad to connect to in the context of a decentralized marketplace.Finally, the group discussed the call cadence and agreed to continue with calls every two weeks. They hope to break down the problem into smaller parts to discuss in the hope of making progress on these important issues.The Lightning Network may require a network-wide upgrade to support channel jamming mitigation features. Circuit breakers and staking credentials require different types of upgrades, and upfront fees require the most cooperation between developers and node operators. Sending nodes may not be incentivized to upgrade to support channel jamming mitigation as it incurs additional costs. Routing nodes do not know if payments come from an un-upgraded node or a node that doesn't want to pay for the mitigation. It was agreed that relaying nodes should initially upgrade but not enforce the feature until later, and nodes can advertise custom upfront fee rates.All implementations' algorithms optimize for factors other than fees, and sender-side behavior will mitigate the risk of low or negative fees. Fee differential issues exist in the network today, and a more complicated approach that includes proof of forward secret could be explored. The impact of dropping a payment on nodes' desire to route through Bob in the future was discussed.The Lightning Network is a protocol that has been developed to address channel jamming attacks. In order to make changes to the protocol, input from many different stakeholders is required. Carla and Clara have invited questions, concerns, and comments in order to progress the Lightning Network. The links provided offer more information on the topic, including meeting transcripts, eprints, and pull requests. Some of the pull requests propose changes to the protocol in order to mitigate channel jamming attacks. There is also an issue in the LSP repository related to this topic. The Lightning-dev mailing list is available for further discussion on the matter.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T11:40:25.698201+00:00