Lightning Series: Privacy and Security with Christian Decker & Carla Kirk-Cohen

 
 
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“Lightning is built on top of the main chain, so you are bringing your on-chain privacy with you, although there’s a transactional increase in privacy...if you send a UTXO from Coinbase to fund your channel, Coinbase knows you sent that to fund your channel.”
— Carla Kirk-Cohen

SHOW DESCRIPTION

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.

TIMESTAMPS

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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SHOW NOTES

Connect with Christian:

Connect with Carla:

Mentioned in the interview:

Other Relevant WBD Podcasts:

PodcastPeter McCormack