Below is a direct excerpt from the Marty’s Bent issue #1253: “Channel Jamming Research You Should Read.” Sign up for the newsletter here,
Here is a great website by Antoine Riard and Gleb Naumenko that solves the problem of channel jamming on the Lightning Network. I highly recommend that you check it out if you want to get a better understanding of one of the Lightning Network’s big attack vectors and how developers are thinking about it. Briefly, a channel jamming attack is a denial of service attack that allows a nefarious actor or actors to prevent routing nodes from forwarding payments within a channel. Increasing the volume of failed payments and reducing the credibility of the Lightning Network as a whole in the process. Not ideal, but completely possible at the moment.
It may not sound great to you, but it is the reality we find in ourselves today. While many people see incredible promise in the Lightning Network, myself included, it is also important that we be upfront with its shortcomings so that we can try to fix them as we build the network. Trying to pretend they don’t exist won’t be beneficial in the long run. This is why we are extremely fortunate that smart individuals like Riard and Naumenko, among many others, are doing a great deal of research, brainstorming and testing to discover ways to solve these problems.
On this site you will be able to read some of the proposed solutions that exist for the channel jamming problem, which involve changing the channel structure using a tree of commitments, actively defending against an attack as it is happening by opening other channels (doesn’t seem ideal), and the concept of bucketing separate slots into smaller and larger denominations, separating channels of a particular size. There doesn’t seem to be a consensus on whether any of these solutions are ideal or on a practical scale. However, it is a great jumping off point for interaction between website developers and users who want to solve this problem. More awareness leads to more mind thinking about these problems and that is a good thing in the long run.
Kudos to Riard, Naumenko, and every other developer working to solve these problems. The work they are doing is very important and can prove to make humanity more free and the world a better place in our lifetime.
ahead!