<oembed><type>rich</type><version>1.0</version><author_name>npub1vjzmc45k8dgujppapp2ue20h3l9apnsntgv4c0ukncvv549q64gsz4x8dd</author_name><author_url>https://nostr.ae/npub1vjzmc45k8dgujppapp2ue20h3l9apnsntgv4c0ukncvv549q64gsz4x8dd</author_url><provider_name>njump</provider_name><provider_url>https://nostr.ae</provider_url><html>📅 Original date posted:2020-06-18&#xA;📝 Original message:&#xA;Hi Rene,&#xA;&#xA;Thanks for disclosing this vulnerability,&#xA;&#xA;I think this blackmail scenario holds but sadly there is a lower scenario.&#xA;&#xA;Both &#34;Flood &amp; Loot&#34; and your blackmail attack rely on `update_fee`&#xA;mechanism and unbounded commitment transaction size inflation. Though the&#xA;first to provoke block congestion and yours to lockdown in-flight fees as&#xA;funds hostage situation.&#xA;&#xA;&gt; 1. The current solution is to just not use up the max value of&#xA;htlc&#39;s. Eclaire and c-lightning by default only use up to 30 htlcs.&#xA;&#xA;As of today, yes I would recommend capping commitment size both for&#xA;ensuring competitive propagation/block selection and limiting HTLC exposure.&#xA;&#xA;&gt; 2. Probably the best fix (not sure if I understand the consequences&#xA;correctly) is coming from this PR to bitcoin core (c.f.&#xA;https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/15681 by @TheBlueMatt . If I get it&#xA;correctly with that we could always have low fees and ask the person who&#xA;want to claim their outputs to pay fees. This excludes overpayment and&#xA;could happen at a later stage when fees are not spiked. Still the victim&#xA;who offered the htlcs would have to spend those outputs at some time.&#xA;&#xA;It&#39;s a bit more complex, carve-out output, even combined with anchor output&#xA;support on the LN-side won&#39;t protect against different flavors of pinning.&#xA;I invite you to go through logs of past 2 LN dev meetings.&#xA;&#xA;&gt; 3. Don&#39;t overpay fees in commitment transactions. We can&#39;t foresee the&#xA;future anyway&#xA;&#xA;Once 2. is well-addressed we may deprecate `update_fee`.&#xA;&#xA;&gt; 4. Don&#39;t add htlcs for which the on chain fee is higher than the HTLCs&#xA;value (like we do with sub dust amounts and sub satoshi amounts. This would&#xA;at least make the attack expensive as the attacker would have to bind a lot&#xA;of liquidity.&#xA;&#xA;Ideally we want dust_limit to be dynamic, dust cap should be based on HTLC&#xA;economic value, feerate of its output, feerate of HTLC-transaction, feerate&#xA;estimation of any CPFP to bump it. I think that&#39;s kind of worthy to do once&#xA;we solved 3. and 4&#xA;&#xA;&gt; 5. Somehow be able to aggregate htlc&#39;s. In a world where we use payment&#xA;points instead of preimages we might be able to do so. It would be really&#xA;cool if separate HTLC&#39;s could be combined to 1 single output. I played&#xA;around a little bit but I have not come up with a scheme that is more&#xA;compact in all cases. Thus I just threw in the idea.&#xA;&#xA;Yes we may encode all HTLC in some Taproot tree in the future. There are&#xA;some wrinkles but for a high-level theoretical construction see my post on&#xA;CoinPool.&#xA;&#xA;&gt; 6. Split onchain fees differently (now the attacker would also lose fees&#xA;by conducting this attack) - No I don&#39;t want to start yet another fee&#xA;bikeshadding debate. (In particular I believe that a different split of&#xA;fees might make the Flood &amp; Loot attack economically more viable which&#xA;relies on the same principle)&#xA;&#xA;Likely a bit more of fee bikeshedding is something we have to do to make LN&#xA;secure... Switching fee from pre-committed ones to a single-party, dynamic&#xA;one.&#xA;&#xA;&gt; Independently I think we should have a hint in our readme file about&#xA;where and how people can disclose attacks and vulnerabilities.&#xA;Implementations have this but the BOLTs do not.&#xA;&#xA;I 100% agree, that&#39;s exactly&#xA;https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/pull/772, waiting for&#xA;your feedback :)&#xA;&#xA;Cheers,&#xA;&#xA;Antoine&#xA;&#xA;Le mer. 17 juin 2020 à 09:41, ZmnSCPxj via Lightning-dev &lt;&#xA;lightning-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org&gt; a écrit :&#xA;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; Good morning all,&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; &gt;&#xA;&gt; &gt; Fee futures could help against this.&#xA;&gt; &gt; I remember writing about this some time ago but cannot find where (not&#xA;&gt; sure if it was in lightning-dev or bitcoin-dev).&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; `harding` found it:&#xA;&gt; https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2020-January/017601.html&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; Regards,&#xA;&gt; ZmnSCPxj&#xA;&gt; _______________________________________________&#xA;&gt; Lightning-dev mailing list&#xA;&gt; Lightning-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org&#xA;&gt; https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lightning-dev&#xA;&gt;&#xA;-------------- next part --------------&#xA;An HTML attachment was scrubbed...&#xA;URL: &lt;http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/attachments/20200618/4505fed3/attachment.html&gt;</html></oembed>