As the Bitcoin [BTC] market had just begun its recovery path, the Lightning Network’s LND node encountered a major bug. While the network was affected by this bug, it should be noted that this was the second bug the network had experienced in less than a month.
The bug made its way onto the LND node which forced its operators to issue an emergency update on November 1. The bug reportedly led to LND nodes falling out of sync chain.
Some LND nodes reportedly ceased syncing as a result of a problem with the btcd wire parsing library. Almost three hours after the break, the hot fix [v. 015.4] was made available. Lightning Labs, the firm behind Bitcoin’s Lightning Network urged the community to update their nodes to the latest version.
Elaborating on the above release, the firm said,
“This is an emergency hot fix release to fix a bug that can cause LND nodes to be unable to parse certain transactions that have a very large number of witness inputs. This release contains no major features and is instead just a hotfix applied on top of v0.15.3.”
It was further brought to light that only the LND nodes were affected. Once channel timelocks expire in two weeks, non-updated nodes will be susceptible to malicious channel closings. Despite this, payment transactions were available while the state of the existing chain was outdated.
Adam Back, the CEO of Blockstream said otherwise.
Here’s who triggered the LND node bug
As mentioned earlier, this was the second time in less than a month that the LND node was attacked. Both these bugs were reportedly initiated by a developer who went by the name Burak on Twitter.
The transaction even came with a message that read “you’ll run cln. and you’ll be happy.”
Back on October 9, the developer created a 998-of-999 multisig transaction. This further instigated the rejection of btcd and LND nodes that eventually caused a rejection of the entire block. Burak even boasted about his move and said,
“I just did a 998-of-999 tapscript multisig, and it only cost $4.90 in transaction fees.”
Amidst all of this, the Bitcoin Lightning Network capacity continues to remain over 5,000 BTC. At press time, it was noted to be 5,002.195 BTC.
