Antoine Riard discovered a critical vulnerability in the Bitcoin’s lightning network called “replacement cycling attacks”.
Lightning network is a layer-2 scaling network dedicated to providing Bitcoin transactions at nearly zero cost & immediately. This layer-2 network was proposed in 2015 and officially launched in Jan 2018. In the early days, many people criticized the Lightning network concept for Bitcoin & called it a centralized Bitcoin payment system but after the increment in the trade price of Bitcoin, this lightning network grabbed huge popularity & adoption, as layer-1 Bitcoin transaction costs high fees.
Last week a Bitcoin developer Antoine Riard published a report on a critical vulnerability associated with the Lightning network.
According to the Bitcoin developer, vulnerability has the potential to jeopardize the security of funds flowing through the Lightning Network.
According to Riard, this vulnerability may allow an attacker to execute a “transaction-relay jamming attack” and target a crucial Lightning Network component known as Hash Time Locked Contracts (HTLC). In short, if any hacker was able to disrupt the normal flow of Bitcoin transactions across the lightning network.
Riard confirmed that no such practical attacks have been seen in the past 10 months. All the lightning network developers have been informed regarding this issue & mitigation steps have been taken, with patches deployed across major Lightning Network implementations like Eclair, LND, and C-Lightning.
Strangely Riard distanced his hand from the involvement in the Lightning network development activities, from now.
Antoine Riard, a Lightning Network security researcher and developer, withdraws from LN’s development and implementations:
“This new class of replacement cycling attacks puts lightning in a very perilous position, where only a sustainable fix can happen at the base-layer”. pic.twitter.com/NVfsm6ityN
— Vini Barbosa (@vinibarbosabr) October 21, 2023
Bitcoin price
The current trade price of Bitcoin is $30,544 & this trade price is $30,508 & this trade price is 14% higher over the last 30 days of trade price.
The trade price of Bitcoin surged rapidly within the last week, as several media reports & experts said that the Bitcoin spot ETF application approval date is very near.
