Latency and Privacy in Lightning

The discussion revolves around the intricacies of improving security and efficiency in payment routing, specifically addressing the challenges and potential strategies related to attributable failures and adversarial scenarios within a network. It delves into the concerns and suggestions for encoding hold times in payment routing, emphasizing the flexibility and potential manipulation by routing nodes which could undermine the reliability of using hold times as a metric for evaluating node performance. The critique highlights the possibility that routing nodes might misrepresent their hold times to appear more attractive to senders, suggesting that current implementations and speculative enhancements might not yet offer the precision or reliability desired for optimal pathfinding and scoring algorithms.

Moreover, the conversation shifts focus towards strategies for mitigating risks posed by off-path adversaries, pointing out the appeal of LND-style commitment batching as a method to decrease the predictability of payment attempts, albeit at the cost of speed. It advocates for prioritizing data and traffic obfuscation techniques over timing defenses to confuse potential attackers without imposing additional costs on payment senders. Specifically, it suggests the implementation of cover traffic and mock payments as methods to obscure real payment paths and intentions, thereby enhancing network-level privacy and security. These measures include sending mock payments along similar routes to real payments, and broadcasting empty messages with TTL fields to create unpredictable traffic patterns, all designed to dilute the efficacy of network-level adversaries in tracing payment activities.

Finally, regarding on-path adversaries, the communication briefly mentions the effectiveness of sender/receiver-controlled delays as a defense mechanism, though it provides no detailed exploration of this aspect. This suggests an acknowledgment of the complexity of securing payment routing against various forms of interference, while also highlighting the continuous search for balanced solutions that do not overly compromise efficiency or user control.