Author: Corné Plooy 2018-03-19 13:59:11
Published on: 2018-03-19T13:59:11+00:00
The use of a payee-determined route section protects the payee from being located by the payer, but it raises questions about how the payer contacted the payee in the first place. If the payee was contacted via IP or non-.onion hostname, then the payee has already been located and there is no point in hiding from the payer. If the payee was contacted via .onion hostname, then the payee's security is bounded by the security of TOR.Onion routing on LN in general protects both the payer and payee from being known easily by intermediate hop nodes, and this is the sole intent of onion routing for now. Presumably, if the payee is a merchant, it knows how to send its product to the payer and would know details like the physical address of the payer. The payee-determined route that starts from the introduction point protects the payee from the payer, but does it indeed increase the security or is there some other way to locate the payee anyway?If a payee has an LN node that is 100% a TOR hidden service and doesn't use a partially payee-determined route, the payee has to reveal its node ID to the payer. Running a node as a TOR hidden service is not sufficient, as over time, knowledge about the node ID can leak out and get combined, revealing things you don't want to be revealed. Using a TOR hidden service may not always be necessary; in some cases, you could alternatively set up payer/payee communication over a more-or-less anonymous physical medium.The alternative approach to partially payee-determined routes would be to run different nodes for different identities and to regularly shut down nodes and set up new ones. This requires expensive on-chain actions though (more expensive than setting up a new TOR hidden service), and it's not good for the rest of the network either if channels are regularly shut down. TOR is necessary because your IP address can often be linked to you, and partially payee-determined routes are necessary because your node ID can often be linked to you.
Updated on: 2023-05-24T21:43:09.853448+00:00