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Explicitly match on-the-fly HTLCs after a restart - #3357

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on-the-fly-payment-hash-dup-restart
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Explicitly match on-the-fly HTLCs after a restart#3357
t-bast wants to merge 1 commit into
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on-the-fly-payment-hash-dup-restart

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@t-bast

@t-bast t-bast commented Aug 14, 2026

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When we restart our node, we look at HTLCs that have been received but not relayed yet: they must be failed back, otherwise we would let them in the incoming channel until their timeout is reached, which would force our peer to force-close.

There is an exception for HTLCs that are paying for an on-the-fly funded channel: we will explicitly retry relaying those HTLCs, even after a restart, because that's how we get paid for the funding fees. We were only matching them by payment_hash, which wasn't precise enough: an attacker could initiate an on-the-fly channel and then send unrelated HTLCs that use the same payment_hash, just to mess up with us and get some of our channels force-closed.

We already have the detailed information about on-the-fly HTLCs in our DB, so we now use that to match HTLCs on the corresponding channel_id and htlc_id, which guarantees uniqueness.

This was reported by Loupe (https://github.com/project-loupe).

When we restart our node, we look at HTLCs that have been received but
not relayed yet: they must be failed back, otherwise we would let them
in the incoming channel until their timeout is reached, which would
force our peer to force-close.

There is an exception for HTLCs that are paying for an on-the-fly funded
channel: we will explicitly retry relaying those HTLCs, even after a
restart, because that's how we get paid for the funding fees. We were
only matching them by `payment_hash`, which wasn't precise enough: an
attacker could initiate an on-the-fly channel and then send unrelated
HTLCs that use the same `payment_hash`, just to mess up with us and get
some of our channels force-closed.

We already have the detailed information about on-the-fly HTLCs in our
DB, so we now use that to match HTLCs on the corresponding `channel_id`
and `htlc_id`, which guarantees uniqueness.
@t-bast
t-bast requested review from pm47 and sstone August 14, 2026 14:34
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