Conner Fromknecht [ARCHIVE] on Nostr: 📅 Original date posted:2018-04-17 📝 Original message: Good evening ZmnSCPxj, > ...

📅 Original date posted:2018-04-17
📝 Original message:
Good evening ZmnSCPxj,

> Also, thank you for the link.

Definitely! I had to do some digging myself to recover these hidden gems.

> I understand. It would be good to know what you have, and perhaps consider
> planning a new BOLT document for such.

Yes, that is the ultimate goal. I think it might be a little to soon to
have a
full-on BOLT spec. There are still some implementation details that we would
like to address before formalizing everything. I am working to have
something
written up in the short-term documenting the approach[es] that ends up being
solidified. Hopefully that can get some eyes during development, and perhaps
serve as working document/rough draft.

> Sorry, I seem confused this idea. Can you give example for commitment
with 2x
> HTLC?

Sure thing! The confirmation of second level HTLC txns can be separated by
arbitrary delays. This is particularly true if the CLTVs have already
expired,
offering an attacker total control over when the txns appear on the
network. One
way this can happen is if the attacker iteratively broadcasts a single
second-level txn, waits for confirmation and CSV to expire, then repeat with
another second-level txn.

Since the CSVs begin ticking as soon as they are included in the chain, the
attacker could try to sweep each one immediately after its CSV expires. If
the
watchtower doesn't have the ability to sweep outputs independently, it would
have no way to intercept this behavior, and prevent the breacher from
sweeping
individual HTLCs sequentially.

> When the commitment txid is found onchain, the WatchTower creates a single
> main output claim transaction using the 1 or 2 signatures for the main
> outputs. And for each HTLC outpoint on the commitment transaction, if it
gets
> spent, the WatchTower creates one HTLC justice transaction from the
> second-stage HTLC transaction.

Yes, this is how it would work in context of what I was suggesting.
Certainly,
there are other ways to accomplish the same thing. I don't wish to claim
that
this is the best solution available, there are a lot of tradeoffs that need
to be evaluated. I'm hoping that you and others can bring any shortcomings
to
light and help us sift through them.

> 5. 0 or 1 or 2 signatures for the main outputs. These sign a single
> transaction that claims only the main outputs.

Yes, it seems necessary to separate the commitment outpoints from the HTLC
outpoints in case the commitment txn is broadcasted before the CLTVs expire.
You could try to batch these with the HTLCs, but then we get back into
exponential territory.

> Is that approximately what is needed? Have I missed anything?

Nope, I think your understanding is on point. IMO this seems to be a
reasonable
compromise of the tradeoffs at hand, and definitely something that could
serve
as an initial iteration due to its simplicity. In the future, there
are definitely
ways
to improve on this on make it even more efficient! Though having a
solid/workable v0 is important if it is to be deployed. I enjoy hearing your
thoughts on this, thank you for your responses!

Best,
Conner

On Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 6:14 AM ZmnSCPxj <ZmnSCPxj at protonmail.com> wrote:

> Good morning Conner,
>
>
>
>
> Hi ZmnSCPxj,
> > Can you describe the "encrypted blob" approach to me? Or point me to
> > materials?
>
> There's an awesome watchtower thread on the mailing list from 2016 that
> starts
> here [1]. It covers a broader range of possibilities than just the
> encrypted
> blob approach, and also considers other revocation schemes, e.g. elkrem.
>
> Similar to what you described, one encrypted blob approached discussed in
> that thread is:
> 1. hint = tixd[:16]
> 2. blob = Enc(data, txid[16:])
> 3. Send (hint, blob) to watchtower.
>
> Whenever a new block is mined, the watchtower checks if it has an entry
> for each
> txid[:16]. If so, it decrypts using txid[16:], assembles the justice txn,
> and
> broadcasts (assuming the reward output matches what was negotiated).
>
>
> Thank you, that is indeed similar to what I was thinking given the name
> "encrypted blob".
>
> Also, thank you for the link. I have not had much time to back-read
> anything older than 2017 in the archives. I observe that neither Poon nor
> Dryja seem to strongly participate in this list from 2017 onwards.
>
>
>
> > Do you have a description of the WatchTower protocol used in lnd? It
> may be
> > useful to be intercompatible.
> We don't have anything written up formally, though what we have currently
> operates on the design above.
>
>
> I understand. It would be good to know what you have, and perhaps consider
> planning a new BOLT document for such.
>
> Nicolas Dorier mentioned plans for BTCPay to somehow host "merchant
> support networks" where merchants may expose WatchTower endpoints, which
> other merchants may post revocation information for their channels to.
>
>
>
> I'll also take this time to brain dump some recent investigations I've
> been doing on
>
>
>
> watchtowers. TL;DR @ fin.
>
>
>
> FWIW, I've been thinking about this in the context of the simple encrypted
> blob approach, though the observations can generalize to other schemes.
>
>
>
> As Laolu mentioned, the storage requirement for the watchtower is
> dominated by
> the number of HTLC signatures included in the encrypted blob. Due to
> independence of the second stage transactions, there is a combinatoric
> blowup in
> the number of signatures that would need to be pre-signed under the
> revocation
> private key _if sweeping of HTLC outputs is batched_.
>
> If we want to batch sweep without more liberal sighash flags, I think we'd
> need to
> pre-sign n*2^n signatures. There are 2^n possible ways that n HTLCs can
> straddle
> the first and second stages, and each permutation would require n distinct
> signatures
> since the set of inputs is unique to each permutation. Needless to say,
> this isn't feasible
> with the maximum number of HTLCs allowed in the protocol.
>
>
> Yes, I thought this too.
>
>
>
> However, I have some observations that might inform an efficient set of
> signatures we can choose to include in the encrypted blobs.
>
>
>
> The first is that the HTLC timeout or HTLC success transaction _must_ be
> broadcast before the attacker can move funds back into their wallet. If
> these transactions are never mined, it is actually fine to do nothing and
> leave
> those outputs in the breached state.
>
> If/when the victim comes back online, they themselves can sign and
> broadcast
> a justice transaction that executes the revocation clause of either the
> offered or
> received HTLC scripts, based on the observed spentness of the various
> commitment
> HLTC outputs at that time. So, we can save on signature data by only
> requiring the
> watchtower to act if second stage transactions are confirmed.
>
>
> This is a good observation! I initially thought that we would have to
> provide both the first-stage and second-stage revocation signatures.
>
>
> One reallyyy nice thing about not having the watchtower sweep the HTLC
> outputs
> on the commitment txn directly is that it doesn't need to know how to
> reconstruct the more complex HTLC redeem scripts. It only needs to
> reconstruct
> commitment to-local and second-stage to-local scripts and witnesses. This
> means
> the blob primarily contains:
> - 1 revocation pubkey
> - 1 local delay pubkey
> - 1 CSV delay
> - 2 commitment signatures
> - n HTLC signatures
> and we don't have to bother sending CLTVs, local/remote htlc pubkeys, or
> payment hashes at all.
>
> The storage for this ends up being something like ~100 + 64*(2+nhtlcs)
> when you
> include other things like the sweep address.
>
>
> Thank you, that seems like a start at something that can be implemented.
>
>
> The second observation is that the second stage transactions could be
> broadcast
> sequentially such that the CSV delays don't overlap at all. In this
> event, the
> watchtower needs to sweep the HTLCs iteratively to prevent the attacker
> from
> sweeping any of the outputs as the relative timelocks expire.
>
>
> Sorry, I seem confused this idea. Can you give example for commitment
> with 2x HTLC?
>
>
> One minimal solution could be to send signatures for independent sweep
> transactions, allowing the watchtower to sweep each HTLC output
> individually.
> This is nice because it permits the watchtower to sweep exactly the
> subset of
> HTLCs that ever transition into the second stage, and under any
> permutation
> wrt. ordering of confirmed second stage transactions.
>
>
> Yes, this seems like a good general idea.
>
>
> With the single transaction per HTLC approach, the total number of
> signatures that
> are sent to the watchtower remains linear in the number HTLCs on the
> commitment
> transaction. This approach does have the downside of consuming slightly
> more
> fees, since each output is swept with a distinct transaction.
>
>
>
> However, this approach is fairly efficient in preventing the attacker
> entirely from
> moving funds from the channel into their wallet wrt. to the amount of data
> stored.
> Considering that the majority of the channel balance is expected to be in
> the commitment outputs and that hypothetically on-chains fees are offset
> by the
> remote balance, this could be an acceptable tradeoff.
>
>
>
> I suspect that in practice, most second stage transactions will be valid
> by the
> time an attacker would drop to chain. Because of this, it's possible that
> they
> could be mined in the same block as the breach transaction.
>
> If everything is mined in the same block or in quick succession, it might
> be
> worthwhile to also pre-sign a justice txn that batch sweeps all HTLCs
> directly
> from the second layer, requiring one additional signature/HTLC.
> This could be a plausible scenario if the offender breached
> unintentionally, and
> their implementation tries to proceed normally. However it does require
> all of the
> CSV delays to conincide. If that doesn't happen, the watchtower can always
> resort to sweeping the outputs individually.
>
> All in all, I think the ability to sweep each HTLC independently is
> more-or-less
> a requirement just given the complexity of how the on-chain state-space can
>
> manifest, especially if CLTVs have already expired. Other scenarios may
> be worth including on a case by case basis or if we feel they are
> justified. This
> could be handled dynamically by including some bitvector or some compact
> representation of how to reconstruct the transactions for any additional,
> included
> signatures.
>
>
> Okay. So it seems, the blob contains:
>
> 1. Revocation pubkey (from our revocation basepoint and per-commitment
> basepoint)
> 2. Their delayed payment pubkey (needed in scripts)
> 3. Our imposed to_self_delay (the setting we indicate, that we impose on
> the remote side)
> 4. Our payment pubkey
> 5. 0 or 1 or 2 signatures for the main outputs. These sign a single
> transaction that claims only the main outputs.
> 6. 0 or more second-stage HTLC revocation signatures. These sign
> individual transactions (one per HTLC) that claims only the second-stage
> HTLC output.
> 7. scriptpubkey to put all the funds in.
>
> When the commitment txid is found onchain, the WatchTower creates a single
> main output claim transaction using the 1 or 2 signatures for the main
> outputs. And for each HTLC outpoint on the commitment transaction, if it
> gets spent, the WatchTower creates one HTLC justice transaction from the
> second-stage HTLC transaction.
>
> Is that approximately what is needed? Have I missed anything?
>
> Regards,
> ZmnSCPxj
>
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