The initiation of a large bitcoin transaction briefly desynchronized the nodes of most of the Lightning Network.
The founder of the Turkish blockchain company Bitmatrix, Burak Keceli, decided to test the limits of what is possible for the Lightning Network. The developer created and executed a complex transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain that brought down most of the nodes in the Lightning network.
The transaction was a multi-signature payment in which multiple cryptographic keys were used to confirm a single transaction. Usually several people are involved in such transactions. Burak Kacheli created a multi-signature 998 out of 999, where 998 out of 999 possible keys had to be used to sign a transaction.
As a result, the technical experiment brought down much of the Lightning Network, and many users began to complain that they could not synchronize with the network, that it became inaccessible through their own nodes.
According to Lightning experts, the desynchronization of nodes occurred due to a bug in the btcd parsing library, where restrictions were checked against data from an outdated version of the code.
In August, researchers at the University of Illinois reported that the Lightning Network was potentially vulnerable to a so-called “zombie attack” and a coordinated double-spend attack. Cosimo Sguanci and Anastasios Sidiropoulos discovered that a hypothetical attack by a coalition of 30 node operators could successfully steal at least 750 BTC ($17 million).
Source: Bits
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