Lightning Network releases emergency update after critical bug on LND nodes
An emergency update was released to all of Lightning Network's LND node operators on Nov. 1, after a critical bug caused LND nodes to fall out of sync chain. This was the second critical bug experienced by the network in less than a month.
According to Lightning Labs, developer of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, some LND nodes stopped syncing due to an issue with the btcd wire parsing library. The hot fix (v.015.4) was released nearly three hours after the break. The release stated:
As per the issue on GitHub, non-updated nodes will be vulnerable to malicious channel closings once channel timelocks expire in two weeks. The bug impacted only LND nodes, making the current chain state outdated, although payments transactions were still available. Some versions of electrs were also impacted, according to another issue on GitHub.
The bug was triggered by a developer dubbed Burak on Twitter, with a message in the transaction saying: “you'll run cln. and you'll be happy.”
Sometimes to find the light, we must first touch the darkness.https://t.co/dhCwF0DxpE
Burak was also responsible for triggering a similar bug on Oct. 9, when they created a 998-of-999 multisig transaction that was rejected by btcd and LND nodes, leading to the rejection of the whole block and all blocks following the transaction. On the same day, Lightning Labs released a patch to fix the issue.
I just did a 998-of-999 tapscript multisig, and it only cost $4.90 in transaction fees.https://t.co/CvBHaRAqPu
Related: What is the Lightning Network in Bitcoin, and how does it work?
On Twitter, users suggested that it was time for an LND bug bounty program:
Savage takedown of LND lightning nodes by exploiting a consensus discrepancy between Bitcoin Core and btcd with a
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