Bitcoin Lightning Network’s LND nodes record second critical failure in a month
Like Bitcoin [BTC] market had just begun its recovery path, Lightning Network’s LND node encountered a major error. While the network was affected by this failure, it should be noted that this was the second failure the network had experienced in less than a month.
The fault entered the LND node forcing operators to issue an emergency update on November 1. The bug reportedly caused LND nodes to drop out of the synchronization chain.
Some LND nodes have reportedly stopped syncing as a result of an issue with the btcd wire parsing library. Almost three hours after the break, hot fix [v. 015.4] was made available. Lightning Labs, the firm behind Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, urged the community to update their nodes to the latest version.
Elaborating on the release above, the firm said,
“This is an emergency hotfix release to fix a bug that could cause LND nodes to be unable to parse certain transactions that have a very large number of witness inputs. This release contains no major features and is instead just a hotfix applied on top of v0 .15.3.”
It was further revealed that only the LND nodes were affected. When the channel time locks expire in two weeks, non-updated nodes will be vulnerable to malicious channel closures. Despite this, payment transactions were available while the state of the existing chain was out of date.
Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream said otherwise.
Here’s who triggered the LND node bug
As mentioned earlier, this was the second time in less than a month that the LND node was attacked. Both of these bugs were allegedly initiated by a developer who went by the name Burak on Twitter.
The transaction even came with a message that reads “you’ll run cln. and you’ll be happy.”
Back October 9, the developer created a 998-out-of-999 multisig transaction. This further led to the rejection of btcd and LND nodes which eventually caused a rejection of the entire block. Burak even boasted about his move and so,
“I just did a 998-of-999 tapscript multisig and it only cost $4.90 in transaction fees.”
In the midst of all this, the Bitcoin Lightning Network capacity continues to be over 5,000 BTC. At press time, it was noted to be 5,002,195 BTC.
