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1 sat \ 7 replies \ @kilianbuhn 28 Dec 2022
Can somebody tldr what channel jamming is?
I know what jamming is, i know what (d)dos is but I don't get the connection here? 🙄
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1 sat \ 4 replies \ @0260378aef 28 Dec 2022
(Deliberately a bit vague, but hopefully understandable)
There are basically two types.
Anyone can request to do a payment routed through your node, and the point of LN's privacy is that you don't know who the original requester was, nor who the final recipient was. You just see the request coming from one of your peers, and going out to another one of your peers.
If someone requests to do a payment of 100k sats and your channel has a 105k sat capacity, then until that payment either completely succeeds or completely fails, your liquidity in the channel can be locked up by that. And that can be a not trivial amount of time, during which your channel can't be used by anyone else.
Doing that maliciously is called "capacity jamming".
On the other hand "slot jamming" happens for a less obvious reason: your channel can't deal with 1000s of payments being routed through it at once, because each one needs to take up an output (see: HTLC) in the commitment transaction which shouldn't be going on-chain, but you need to be able to broadcast it if necessary. But bitcoin transactions are limited in size (and certain other things). So someone can jam by starting tons of payments at once, even if they're only tiny, like 1 sat or whatever, it can still jam your channel because you can't accept any more, during that time.
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1 sat \ 3 replies \ @kilianbuhn 28 Dec 2022
Thx. To my understanding this is a very bad name - it has nothing to do with jamming.
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1 sat \ 2 replies \ @0260378aef 28 Dec 2022
Oh, interesting, why do you say so? It "jams up" the channel in that there's no room for other payments. Seems like a decent name?
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1 sat \ 1 reply \ @kilianbuhn 28 Dec 2022
But that's literally not what jamming is. The word "jamming" already is an attack in computer science/engineering: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_jamming
I think it's very confusing to give another unrelated attack in computer science the same name.
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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @0260378aef 28 Dec 2022
There's a big overlap there. In both cases you are filling up bandwidth with the specific purpose of preventing other people using that bandwidth. It's basically the same thing with a different adjective (channel vs radio). I don't understand what you would see as problematic there.
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1 sat \ 1 reply \ @Eximpius 28 Dec 2022
I think its done by bad actor nodes. If I remember correctly but don’t quote me and someone please correct me if im wrong. I think the node runner makes it to where his node will only route to another of his channels, causing payments to jam up at their node. I could be totally wrong here.
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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @Eximpius 28 Dec 2022
Reverse DDOS would be a better name for explaining it. Instead of sending out a lot of data to a server(node) clogging it up, you are sitting in the middle catching data causing a backup before the data gets to the node(server)
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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinIsTheFuture 28 Dec 2022
It’s possible and a real issue. Great to see us looking at ways to improve lighting as layer two is key to scaling adoption!
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