A not so critical flaw – At the start of the week, the Bitcoin’s Lightning Network has been in the spotlights. In fact, the developer Antoine Riard revealed the presence of a flaw described as critical. However, this could prove less critical than expected.
Replacement Cycling: a flaw on the LN
On October 16, the developer Antoine Riard has sounded the alarm about the Lightning Network. In fact, he announces having discovered an attack vector. This would allow an attacker to steal their victim’s funds via a Lightning Network payment channel.
Without going into too much detail, the attack exploits a flaw allowing you to replace an unconfirmed transaction on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. By using two payment channels with the victim, the attacker continually replaces the victim’s transaction with their own. If successful, the victim cannot recover their funds on time, resulting in a loss of money.
At the time of the announcement, Riard said he there was no viable long-term solution to mitigate this attack vector. According to him, only a complete revision of the HTLC protocol would be effective. However, this requires a soft fork of Bitcoin.
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A shared opinion
Obviously, this news had the effect of bomb in the Bitcoin community. After analysis, other bell sounds began to be heard.
For example, the Internet user Shinobi published an article on this subject on Bitcoin Magazine. This begins by calming the situation:
“This is a legitimate vulnerability in the Lightning Protocol, but the sky is not falling. »
According to him, several elements make it possible to put this attack vector into perspective. First, he identified several problems with this attack:
- The attacker must specifically target the victim’s node to succeed;
- The attack can be costly in transaction fees.
“The victim’s Bitcoin Core node must be specifically targeted to ensure that at no point does the preimage success transaction propagate into their mempool where their Lightning node can acquire the preimage. »
On the other hand, he identified several ways to mitigate this flaw. For example, by making nodes regularly retransmit their transactions with slightly increased fees to make the attack costly.
“Bob can therefore force Alice to incur a significant cost simply by regularly rebroadcasting his timeout transaction with a higher commission, meaning that if the payment produced by HTLC is not worth much more than the fees Alice might incur, the attack is not worth carrying out from an economic point of view. »
Regardless, no soft fork on the horizon for Shinobi in the face of this flaw on the Lightning Network. Despite this flaw, the LN is on the rise and recorded a 1212% increase in the number of transactions In two years.
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