This week’s newsletter announces a new maintenance release of LND, summarizes a discussion about watchtowers for eltoo payment channels, and describes several notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

Action items

• ● Help test LND 0.8.2-beta RC2: this release candidate contains several bug fixes and minor UX improvements, most notably for the recovery of static channel backups. (One of these improvements is described later in this newsletter.)

News

• ● Watchtowers for eltoo payment channels: eltoo is a proposed alternative payment channel layer for LN that doesn’t require participants be able to generate penalty transactions. Watchtowers are services that broadcast a pre-programmed transaction if they detect that one of their client’s channels is being closed using an older state; this allows their clients to go offline without risking a loss of funds.

  Conner Fromknecht started a thread asking what data watchtowers would need to store for eltoo and how that would affect the scalability of watchtowers or the privacy of their clients. One option would be for a watchtower to store only the latest update transaction. This is highly scalabale because it only requires a constant amount of storage per channel, and it’s secure because only the final settlement transaction can spend from the final update transaction. The offline node can broadcast the settlement transaction whenever it next comes online, even if that is months or years later.

  An alternative mechanism discussed would be for the watchtower to also store the settlement transaction. This could provide additional safety in case the node lost all data while it was offline by sending funds to the node’s desired withdrawal address (such as an address in its cold wallet). However, it would increase the storage requirements for watchtowers and, worse, the obvious way to implement it would significantly reduce user privacy by giving watchtowers enough data to learn details about previous payments made in the user’s payment channels. Some participants in the thread discussed ways to obtain the safety benefits while mitigating the privacy loss, although no clear conclusion was reached in the thread as of this writing.

Notable code and documentation changes

Notable changes this week in Bitcoin Core, C-Lightning, Eclair, LND, libsecp256k1, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), and Lightning BOLTs.

• ● C-Lightning #3260 adds new createonion and sendonion RPC methods that allow external tools or C-Lighting plugins to create and send encrypted LN messages that the node itself doesn’t necessarily understand. Some use cases for this mechanism described in the PR include: cross-chain atomic swaps, rendez-vous routing (see Newsletter #22), trampoline payments, and chat-over-LN similar to WhatSat.

• ● C-Lightning #3295 extends the listinvoices RPC with a new field containing the payment preimage for any invoices that have already been paid. (The preimage isn’t shown for unpaid invoices in order to prevent the user from accidentally sharing the preimage before a payment has been finalized, which could result in a loss of funds.)

• ● C-Lightning #3155 adds a --statictor (static tor) command line parameter that allows the user to always operate as the same Tor v3 hidden service instead of as an ephemeral hidden service that changes its address on every restart. The static address is derived from the node’s public identifier (pubkey) so the user doesn’t need to store any extra information, although the user can use the --torblob parameter to specify entropy from which the static address will be generated.

• ● LND #3788 adds support for “payment addresses” which are the same thing as the “payment secrets” described in last week’s newsletter. This addition prevents privacy-reducing probing of receiver nodes that are expecting to receive additional parts of a multipath payment.

• ● LND #3767 prevents LND from accepting malformed BOLT11 invoices that have a valid bech32 checksum. As previously reported, bech32 addresses ending with p don’t allow decoders to detect the addition or removal of preceding q characters with the high reliability expected from bech32’s choice of BCH code parameters. This problem is compounded by BOLT11 invoices expecting the paying node to recover the pubkey of the receiver node from the signature appended to the end of the invoice—the location where this type of undetected bech32 mutation would occur. According to code comments in this merged PR, “In rare cases (about 3%) [the mutated signature] is still seen as a valid signature, [so] public key recovery causes a different node than the originally intended one to be derived.” The PR eliminates the problem by rejecting any invoices where the last field in the invoice doesn’t match its expected length.

• ● LND #3698 prints a warning when the user attempts to restore a Static Channel Backup (SCB), ensuring they know all of their channels will be closed (incurring onchain fees). Users of lncli need to acknowledge the prompt before continuing.

• ● LND #3655 adds support for BOLT2 upfront shutdown scripts where the withdrawal address for a node is specified before opening a channel and that address is locked in for the life of the channel. If the node later requests its payments be sent to a different address, its counterparty should refuse that request. This makes it more difficult for an attacker who compromises a node to withdraw funds to the attacker’s onchain wallet (although the attacker may still attempt to steal funds in other ways).