Published on: 2018-11-13T23:08:40+00:00
In her thesis project focused on the recovering mechanism of false positives in the Lightning network, Margherita Favaretto proposes using watchtowers as backup nodes instead of other connected nodes. Watchtowers are defined as full nodes that are online 24/7 and can guarantee service. She suggests encrypting the payload with the public key of the node A to protect the privacy of the node and prevent watchtowers from decrypting or modifying the payload. The payload contains information about the status channel and nonce-time, which are encrypted on the public key of A. Watchtowers cannot know the status channel of A or the channel ID between A and the specific watchtower. Margherita recommends sending the actual nonce-time and payload to one watchtower and just sending the new nonce-time to the others to split the data into different watchtowers without sending the payload after each transaction to all of them.To ensure security, Margherita proposes that each payload with a nonce time older than the current time-nonce is not considered. If a watchtower tries to change the nonce-time and sends a payload with an incorrect nonce-time, Alice can rely on the majority of watchtowers to determine the correct nonce-time. However, there is still a risk of attack if 51% of the watchtowers agree to cheat and send another nonce-time to the node.Margherita suggests using more than one watchtower to mitigate the risk of a single watchtower being attacked and all data inside being deleted. She also proposes sending a small fee through the lightning channel every time a node requests data for backup from the watchtower to incentivize the watchtowers to provide the service consistently.Overall, Margherita's solution aims to address the recovering mechanism of false positives in the Lightning network while considering privacy and security concerns. She seeks feedback on whether it makes sense to overlap the concept of watchtower with the mechanism of backup.
Updated on: 2023-07-31T20:41:53.556204+00:00