Latency and Privacy in Lightning

The discussion raises a pertinent question about the use of cover traffic in the context of HTLCs within a network to thwart surveillance efforts by potential attackers. The concept revolves around the strategic deployment of "fake" HTLCs alongside genuine ones, aiming to generate false positives and thereby obscure the tracking of real transactions. However, it's suggested that the introduction of completely fake HTLCs might not be strictly necessary for this purpose. An alternative approach could involve interleaving various types of messages with the actual HTLC-forwarding messages. This method relies on the assumption that if these messages are sufficiently indistinguishable from one another after padding is applied, they could effectively disrupt the pattern recognition capabilities of an attacker, making it harder to identify genuine HTLC forwarding activities. This strategy underscores the importance of designing communication patterns within the network that can resist surveillance by maintaining ambiguity about which messages represent real transactional activity.