Interview | Description | Timestamps | Show Notes

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Location: Remotely
Date: Monday 19th July
Company: Blockstream, Lightning Labs
Role: Researcher, Infrastructure Engineer

The Bitcoin blockchain is an open public ledger, thus building privacy solutions on-chain is challenging. However, the Lightning network’s design is a massive improvement in privacy as the tradeoffs are different.

Lightning removes transactional friction with significant security and privacy assurances today. But what are the potential attack vectors, and how might they be mitigated?

In this interview, I talk to researcher Christian Decker and infrastructure engineer Carla Kirk-Cohen. We discuss the current state of privacy on Lightning, potential vulnerabilities and most likely solutions.

00:05:36: Introductions
00:07:33: The Chaincode residency
00:10:09: Upfront Shutdown
00:12:47: The Lightning Network use case
00:14:04: Privacy on the Lightning Network
00:22:37: Onion routing and privacy
00:29:41: Implementations and consensus
00:39:34: Jamming and HTLC spamming
00:49:36: Probing
00:59:04: Flood & Loot
01:02:26: Further novel attacks
01:05:49: IP address security through Tor
01:08:15: Rendezvous routing
01:13:28: Carla's current workload
01:14:16: Final comments

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Connect with Christian:

• On Twitter

• On Github

Connect with Carla:

• On Twitter 

• On Github

Mentioned in the interview:

• Lightning Labs - faster, cheaper, global layer two bitcoin | Lightning Labs 

• Chaincode Labs 

• John Newbery (@jfnewbery) 

• Brink.dev 

• Amiti (@amizi) 

• Onion Routing with HTLCs on the Lightning Network explained! - Beginner / Experts

• Multi-signature

• Lightning Network (Part 3) – Where Is The Justice? | Bitmex Blog

• lightningnetwork/lnd: Lightning Network Daemon ⚡️ 

• ElementsProject/lightning: c-lightning — a Lightning Network implementation in C 

• Basis of Lightning Technology (BOLT) | River Intelligence

• lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc BOLT on Github

• Current State of Lightning Network Privacy | Anthony Ronning

• Hash Time Locked Contracts 

• Point Time Locked Contracts (PTLCs) 

• Flood & Loot: A Systemic Attack On The Lightning Network | Harris, Zohar

• [Lightning-dev] Pinning : The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

• Umbrel — your personal Bitcoin node. 

• rootzoll/raspiblitz: Get your own Bitcoin & Lightning Node running - on a RaspberryPi with a nice LCD 

• Tor (network) 

• Rendezvous Routing (Lightning Network) with Christian Decker | YouTube

• Lightning Loop 

• Lightning Loop | Issues on Github

• Security and Privacy of the Lightning Network | Mastering the Lightning Network book

• René Pickhardt (@renepickhardt)

• Donate to René with BTC

• Support René on Patreon

Other Relevant WBD Podcasts:

• WBD373: Lightning Series: Why Bitcoin is Global Money with Jack Mallers

• WBD372: Lightning Series: Running a Node with Openoms & Rootzoll

• WBD371: Lightning Series: Mastering Lightning with Andreas M. Antonopoulos & René Pickhardt

• WBD284: Funding Bitcoin Development with John Newbery

• WBD271: Becoming a Bitcoin Core Developer with Amiti Uttarwar

• WBD210: Is Chainalysis Evil with Jonathan Levin

• WBD196: Beginner’s Guide #13: The Lightning Network with Jack Mallers

• WBD134: John Newbery on Building a Bitcoin Developer Community

• WBD102: Christian Decker on the Tech Coming to Lightning

• WBD092: Christian Decker - An Introduction to The Lightning Network