The under is a direct excerpt of Marty’s Bent Issue #1278: “Another LND/btcd bug emerges.” Sign up for the newsletter here.
by way of GitHub
For the second time in lower than a month, btcd (an alternate implementation of Bitcoin) and, by extension, LND (one of many Lightning implementations) grew to become incompatible with the remainder of the Bitcoin community on account of some meddling from a developer named Burak.
On October 9, Burak accomplished a 998-0f-999 tapscript multisig transaction that btcd acknowledged as invalid whereas Bitcoin Core and different implementations (appropriately) acknowledged it as legitimate. Since LND’s implementation of the Lightning Community will depend on btcd, it grew to become incompatible with the remainder of the Lightning Community, due to this fact disrupting all of their customers’ skill to transact safely. Not ultimate.
Quick-forward to yesterday and Burak was again once more to disrupt btcd and LND with the kind of transaction you see above: a P2TR (pay-to-taproot) spend containing N OP_SUCCESSx with 500,001 pushes, which exceeds the restrict hardcoded into btcd. Whereas the 998-of-999 tapscript multisig transaction gave the impression to be an trustworthy mistake, yesterday’s transaction was an overt exploit within the wild by Burak.
Proof Burak knew this may break LND
One thing to notice about this OP_SUCCESSx transaction is that it usually wouldn’t be included in a block. Nonetheless, evidently Burak bribed miners by attaching a very excessive price to this transaction that F2Pool couldn’t resist.
This case has surfaced numerous debate during the last two days. Was Burak incorrect to take advantage of this bug within the wild on mainnet? Ought to he have correctly disclosed the vulnerability to btcd and LND in personal, permitting them to patch the code earlier than the bug was exploited within the wild? Ought to LND be depending on btcd, which is an alternate implementation of Bitcoin that doesn’t get practically as near the quantity of consideration and evaluation that Bitcoin Core receives?
Your Uncle Marty definitely doesn’t have the precise solutions to all of those questions, nevertheless it’s necessary for you freaks to concentrate on these things so I assumed I’d deliver them to your consideration.
That is the character of open supply distributed programs. There might be numerous vulnerabilities lurking on the market and there’s no clear solution to deal with the issues. Many will advocate for accountable disclosures in personal whereas others will advocate for overt adversarial actions that drive the problem. This is among the trade-offs you select once you resolve to decide right into a free market financial community.
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