Hmm, I'm not quite following the situation. What do you mean by "directs normal traffic"? Since the sender constructs the entire circuit, routing nodes do not get any discretion over which nodes to forward a payment to, only whether to forward or fail. What an attacker could do is perform a loop attack and send a payment to another node that they control and delay the payment on the receiving end. Note that the sending node loses no reputation, only the receiving node. Since the hops being attacked are the ones in the middle and they are faithfully enforcing the reputation protocol, the receiving node's reputation should be penalized properly, making it unlikely the attack will succeed in a second attempt.
On Thu, May 10, 2018 at 2:56 PM, Chris Gough <christopher.d.go...@gmail.com> wrote: > hello, I'm a curious lurker trying to follow this conversation: > > On Thu, 10 May 2018, 2:40 pm ZmnSCPxj via Lightning-dev, < > lightning-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > >> >> The concern however is that the CLTV already partly leaks the distance >> from the payee, whereas the reputation-loss-rate leaks distance from the >> payer. It is often not interesting to know that some entity is getting >> paid, but it probably far more interesting to know WHO paid WHO, so leaking >> both distances simultaneously is more than twice as worse as leaking just >> one distance. >> > > Consider an asymetrically-resourced malevolent node that wants the ability > to harm a specific small nodes without aquiring a bad reputation (and is > willing to pay for it). In preparation, this bad boss node directs normal > traffic to sacrificial nodes they control, while understating the > reputation-risk (truthfully as it turns out, because they have out of band > influence over the node). When the time comes, the sacrificial node > inflicts delay on the victim node and they both suffer, while the boss > keeps her nose clean. > > Is it the case that understating risk of legitimate traffic from boss node > to sacrificial node effectively allows transfer of reputation to the > sacrificial node in preparation for attack, while at the same time > obscuring their association? > > Chris Gough > >> > _______________________________________________ > Lightning-dev mailing list > Lightning-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lightning-dev > >
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