The problem of false positives for double spend attacks

Summary:

A Master's student of Cyber Security at the Technical University of Denmark is currently in San Francisco to advance her academic research on Lightning Network by attending networking events. Her research is focused on a "trusted remediation" protocol for Lightning Network double-spend attacks that seeks to mitigate false positives like software errors and malicious nodes, and wants open feedback about the issue and how to best be in contact with the Lightning-dev group. However, AmkG responded saying there are no possible double-spend attacks on Lightning Network, as you cannot double-spend your funds unless the other end of the channel agrees to it, which would cause them to effectively lose money. They suggest focusing on other things like an atomic multipath protocol that supports contingent payment (pay for secret) protocol or trustless watchtowers. Furthermore, if the problem is the inadvertent publication of revoked commitment transactions, the correct solution is not to have revocable transactions in the first place, i.e. eltoo. Although it may take time for needed features of eltoo to appear on the blockchain layer, it would still take time to implement "trusted remediation", by which time the problem could be solved by switching over to eltoo. The use of "trusted" in the term "trusted remediation" is also seen as a severe negative and unlikely to be accepted.

Updated on: 2023-05-25T14:43:38.233680+00:00