Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Time-dilation Attacks on the Lightning Network

From: Aymeric Vitte <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 12:10:20 +0200

Le 04/06/2020 à 04:58, ZmnSCPxj via bitcoin-dev a écrit :
>> [Tor is tricky](https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.6079) too
> Since the issue here is that eclipsing of Bitcoin nodes is risky, it strikes me that a mitigation would be to run your Bitcoin fullnode on clearnet while running your Lightning node over Tor.
> Eclipsing the Lightning node (but not the Bitcoin fullnode it depends on) "only" loses you the ability to pay, receive, or route (and thereby earn forwarding fees), but as long as your blockchain view is clear, it should be fine.
>
> Of course, the Lightning node could still be correlated with the Bitcoin node when transactions are broadcast with the attached Bitcoin node (as noted in the paper).
> Instead the Lightning node should probably connect, over Tor, to some random Bitcoin fullnodes / Electrum servers and broadcast txes to them.
>
> And this seems to tie with what you propose: that the LN node should use a different view-fullnode from the broadcast-fullnode.
>

The issue each time there are discussions/research linking to Tor is
that it is biased since the beginning because based on a wrong
postulate: using the Tor network

I will not elaborate on this again, it's an obvious very bad idea to use
the Tor network for bitcoin

It's not a bad idea to use the Tor protocol with no story of exit nodes
and hidden services, linking again to:
https://github.com/Ayms/node-Tor#phase-4-and-phase-5

And new link: http://www.peersm.com/Convergence-2020.pdf "A universal
and generic architecture to anonymize any application or protocol and
turn it into an independent decentralized p2p network inside browsers
and servers, with browsers acting as servers"

LN and bitcoin nodes would be relays and/or RDV points and/or clients
and serving parties, some Tor network nodes could be used in the middle
also (relays only) but in any case sybils/eclipse attacks become much
more difficult to perform (or unlikely depending on how the peer
discovery system is designed)

bitcoin | node-Tor |bitcoin and LN.pipe(node-Tor)

Then question for possible future tests: is there a simple way to pipe
the bitcoin protocol via stdin/stdout? (the socks interface could be
used but we already saw that it did raise issues)

-- 
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