Author: Tony Giorgio 2022-06-08 02:05:01
Published on: 2022-06-08T02:05:01+00:00
A Lightning Network (LN) probing project has been underway for the past few months in order to find unannounced channels on the network. As of now, 445 unannounced channels have been found, totalling 1,076,077,750 satoshis locked across three nodes. The results are published publicly on Github. The reason this is possible is because probing is a free operation on the Lightning Network after a channel is opened, and error reasons given are too verbose. The use of `unknown_next_peer`, `invalid_onion_hmac`, `incorrect_cltv_expiry`, and `amount_below_minimum` have been the biggest helpers in exploiting channel privacy. It would be beneficial to migrate to alias scid's and encourage every active unannounced channel holder to close, coinjoin, and reopen with an alias. Until this migration happens, it would be beneficial to stop being so specific about errors.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T08:53:31.762425+00:00