Author: Christian Decker 2023-05-10 11:57:34
Published on: 2023-05-10T11:57:34+00:00
In a Lightning-dev mailing list, Christian expressed his skepticism regarding the usefulness of reputation systems in lightning due to their intrinsic issue. Reputation systems base their expectations on past experiences, making them susceptible to sudden behavioral changes and whitewashing attacks. Christian also highlighted the vulnerability of the edges in large routing nodes that can be more vulnerable to attacks. Antoine Riard responded by suggesting that HTLC endorsement schemes are still vulnerable due to local reputation built during periods of low routing fees and then abused during high routing fees. He recommended some reputational transitivity between incoming and outgoing traffic channels accessible from its local counterparty granting a high level of reputation. He opened an issue on the repository to converge on a threat model. Antoine emphasized that building data gathering infrastructure for Lightning is valuable as any jamming mitigation will have to adapt its upfront fees or reputation acquisition cost based on market forces.Carla Kirk-Cohen shared updates on channel jamming in the next call scheduled for Monday, May 01 at 15:00 UTC. Carla proposed gathering data about the use of HTLC endorsement and local reputation tracking for jamming mitigation. They aim to gather real-world data for future simulation work and experiment with different algorithms for tracking local reputation. Carla explained that each node locally tracks the reputation of its direct neighbors and allocates a number of slots reserved for endorsed HTLCs from high reputation peers based on their risk tolerance. Endorsement and reputation are proposed as the first step in mitigating channel jamming, with unconditional fees for quick jams being the second step.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T12:47:07.784154+00:00