Payment probes
Also covering Probing
Payment probes are packets designed to discover information about the LN channels they travel through, such as whether the channel can currently handle a payment of a certain size or how many bitcoins are allocated to each participant in the channel. Probes use the regular payment (HTLC) mechanism but are designed to always fail, preventing any funds from being transfered. Probing can be useful, but it can also reduce user privacy.
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Optech newsletter and website mentions
2024
- LDK #3103 begins using data collected from frequent probing in its testing benchmarks
- LND #8136 updates the
EstimateRouteFeeRPC to use payment probing
2023
- Dynamic Payment Switching and Splitting (PSS) proposed to thwart Balance Discovery Attacks
- LDK #2534 adds additional support for pre-payment probing
2022
- LDK #1567 adds support for a basic payment probing API
- LDK #1555 now slightly prefers paying through channels which make balance probing harder
- LN developer meeting summary: probing and balance sharing
2021
- Lowering the cost of probing to make attacks more expensive
- Preventing UTXO probing in dual funded channels
2020
- Upfront fees discussion and its ability to make probing more expensive
- Discussion about preventing UTXO probing in interactively constructed LN funding transactions
2019
- C-Lightning #3259 adds support for payment secrets designed to resist recipient probing
- BOLTs #608 provides a privacy update to BOLT4 to probe channels for the ultimate recipient
- Eclair
2018
See also
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