Author: Carla Kirk-Cohen 2023-05-16 19:42:50
Published on: 2023-05-16T19:42:50+00:00
The Lightning Network community is proposing a reputation scheme to mitigate channel jamming attacks. Reputation will be tracked locally for each of a node’s peers, with no gossip component involved. Nodes will track local reputation for their direct peers based on their history with all HTLCs a peer has forwarded to them. The reputation is slow and expensive to build and fast to degrade, so sudden changes in behavior are short-lived. Good reputation is always examined relative to a node’s recent routing activity. In order to determine how much use can be made of local-only reputation-based systems, the community is interested in gathering data on repeat interactions nodes get from individual senders.During regular network operation, nodes that forward fewer HTLCs are less likely to be able to build a good reputation with very active routing nodes. However, this should have low to no impact on their activity as they don’t require much from their peers anyway. Small and low activity nodes will temporarily be in competition for large routing nodes’ scarce liquidity and slots during an attack but will still be able to interact with similar nodes where they have better chances of building a good reputation.The Lightning Network community plans to gather data about the use of HTLC endorsement and local reputation tracking for jamming mitigation. They want to observe the effect of endorsement in the steady state with logging-only implementation, gather real-world data for use in future simulation work, and experiment with different algorithms for tracking local reputation. Each node locally tracks the reputation of its direct neighbors and allocates a number of slots reserved for endorsed HTLCs from high reputation peers and a portion of liquidity reserved for endorsed HTLCs from high reputation peers, per its risk tolerance. Forwarding of HTLCs will depend on whether they are endorsed by a high reputation peer, with endorsement and reputation proposed as the first step in a two-part scheme for mitigating channel jamming.Carla and Clara are looking forward to discussing a topic on the upcoming call. They mention that targets can always fall under a threshold. The message includes links to three GitHub pages, namely Carla's gist page, a pull request for Bolts by Lightning, and a circuit breaker equipment page. The email was sent to the Lightning-dev mailing list, and the list's subscription link is provided at the end of the email.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T12:55:27.336636+00:00