Re: [bitcoin-dev] [Lightning-dev] L2s Onchain Support IRC Workshop

[Jeremy <jlrubin@mit.edu>]

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I'd be excited to join. Recommend bumping the date  to mid June, if that's
ok, as many Americans will be at Bitcoin 2021.

I was thinking about reviving the sponsors proposal with a 100 block lock
on spending a sponsoring tx which would hopefully make less controversial,
this would be a great place to discuss those tradeoffs.

On Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 8:17 AM Antoine Riard <antoine.riard@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> During the lastest years, tx-relay and mempool acceptances rules of the
> base layer have been sources of major security and operational concerns for
> Lightning and other Bitcoin second-layers [0]. I think those areas require
> significant improvements to ease design and deployment of higher Bitcoin
> layers and I believe this opinion is shared among the L2 dev community. In
> order to make advancements, it has been discussed a few times in the last
> months to organize in-person workshops to discuss those issues with the
> presence of both L1/L2 devs to make exchange fruitful.
>
> Unfortunately, I don't think we'll be able to organize such in-person
> workshops this year (because you know travel is hard those days...) As a
> substitution, I'm proposing a series of one or more irc meetings. That
> said, this substitution has the happy benefit to gather far more folks
> interested by those issues that you can fit in a room.
>
> # Scope
>
> I would like to propose the following 4 items as topics of discussion.
>
> 1) Package relay design or another generic L2 fee-bumping primitive like
> sponsorship [0]. IMHO, this primitive should at least solve mempools spikes
> making obsolete propagation of transactions with pre-signed feerate, solve
> pinning attacks compromising Lightning/multi-party contract protocol
> safety, offer an usable and stable API to L2 software stack, stay
> compatible with miner and full-node operators incentives and obviously
> minimize CPU/memory DoS vectors.
>
> 2) Deprecation of opt-in RBF toward full-rbf. Opt-in RBF makes it trivial
> for an attacker to partition network mempools in divergent subsets and from
> then launch advanced security or privacy attacks against a Lightning node.
> Note, it might also be a concern for bandwidth bleeding attacks against L1
> nodes.
>
> 3) Guidelines about coordinated cross-layers security disclosures.
> Mitigating a security issue around tx-relay or the mempool in Core might
> have harmful implications for downstream projects. Ideally, L2 projects
> maintainers should be ready to upgrade their protocols in emergency in
> coordination with base layers developers.
>
> 4) Guidelines about L2 protocols onchain security design. Currently
> deployed like Lightning are making a bunch of assumptions on tx-relay and
> mempool acceptances rules. Those rules are non-normative, non-reliable and
> lack documentation. Further, they're devoid of tooling to enforce them at
> runtime [2]. IMHO, it could be preferable to identify a subset of them on
> which second-layers protocols can do assumptions without encroaching too
> much on nodes's policy realm or making the base layer development in those
> areas too cumbersome.
>
> I'm aware that some folks are interested in other topics such as extension
> of Core's mempools package limits or better pricing of RBF replacement. So
> l propose a 2-week concertation period to submit other topics related to
> tx-relay or mempools improvements towards L2s before to propose a finalized
> scope and agenda.
>
> # Goals
>
> 1) Reaching technical consensus.
> 2) Reaching technical consensus, before seeking community consensus as it
> likely has ecosystem-wide implications.
> 3) Establishing a security incident response policy which can be applied
> by dev teams in the future.
> 4) Establishing a philosophy design and associated documentations (BIPs,
> best practices, ...)
>
> # Timeline
>
> 2021-04-23: Start of concertation period
> 2021-05-07: End of concertation period
> 2021-05-10: Proposition of workshop agenda and schedule
> late 2021-05/2021-06: IRC meetings
>
> As the problem space is savagely wide, I've started a collection of
> documents to assist this workshop : https://github.com/ariard/L2-zoology
> Still wip, but I'll have them in a good shape at agenda publication, with
> reading suggestions and open questions to structure discussions.
> Also working on transaction pinning and mempool partitions attacks
> simulations.
>
> If L2s security/p2p/mempool is your jam, feel free to get involved :)
>
> Cheers,
> Antoine
>
> [0] For e.g see optech section on transaction pinning attacks :
> https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/transaction-pinning/
> [1]
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2020-September/018168.html
> [2] Lack of reference tooling make it easier to have bug slip in like
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2020-October/002858.html
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