Author: Tony Giorgio 2022-06-08 04:12:54
Published on: 2022-06-08T04:12:54+00:00
Tony Giorgio has been working on an LDK probing project for the past few months that searches for unannounced channels on the Lightning Network. In the past week, he has been probing on mainnet and has found nearly 445 unannounced channels totaling 1,076,077,750 satoshis locked across three nodes he has probed. 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 way too verbose. Currently, channel IDs are based on UTXOs. He believes that it is necessary to move to SCIDs, and that error messages alone can't fix it completely. SCID aliases may be the biggest benefit for privacy as they allow a node to request a channel by a random value instead of the value derived from the on-chain transaction. Tony warns that if you have any unannounced channels that you assumed were private and need them to be, close them now on the off chance they get revealed. He suggests that alias SCIDs would be better for privacy, and that error messages revealing information that is meant to be "private" should be avoided in the future.He also mentions that in addition to LDK implementing it, LND is currently working on it. With regards to analytic firms using this, he assumes so, but it's probably easy to tell whether this is happening to your node or not if someone was watching their HTLC routing failure reasons. For more about this project and viewing the dataset, go to http://hiddenlightningnetwork.com.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T08:54:03.130555+00:00