Hello! Over the past month, a few friends and I have built a terminal UI-based tool that has the intention of exploiting and testing the lightning network. This project is called LNsploit. We have built this off of LDK which allows for more advanced features that typical node implementations do not offer out of the box.

The plan was to demo this at TAB Conf on Thursday with a few cool features built in. One that I am excited to share is that we have reproduced and added the ability to broadcast a large script transaction similar to the one that had affected almost all LND nodes earlier this week. This is all done with a single key press while connected to a bitcoind node backed with funds. You can test this today by hooking up to your local network like with Polar on regtest. I suspect this could also be useful in allowing people to explore what had happened and how this had affected those LND nodes. All props to Ben Carman for building that portion in a few dozen lines of code.

While most of the screens and general node logic are still TBD, a few things do work like spinning up many LDK nodes instantly and connecting to channel peers. I had hoped to have more done before the workshop at TAB conf but hey there are still a few days left to polish this up - most of the logic is there, just untested while we are still hooking in screens. The workshop is at 11:30 am on Thursday in case you were interested in joining.

Anyways, I hope to have a lot of useful tools in this that may assist testers and developers. Things like channel jamming, balance probing, broadcasting old revocation transactions, etc. We need to be operating in an adversarial mindset if we're going to fix anything that might need to be fixed and one of the only ways to do that is with efforts like these. Please use this ethically, responsibly, and only on nodes that you have permission to attack.

Huge shout outs to Paul Miller, w3irdrobot, and ben carman for helping with this. Let me know what you think and any questions you may have.