Popular Lightning Analytics Company 'Amboss' Launches Controversial Data Sharing Feature That Threatens Lightning Privacy
This feature hurts the privacy of channel partners of nodes that participate and can degrade privacy of payments routed through those nodes.
- Node operators can now share live onchain, remote, and local balances with Amboss.
- This feature hurts the privacy of channel partners of nodes that participate and can degrade privacy of payments routed through those nodes.
- Channel probing could already allow a malicious entity to determine channel balances of other nodes but critics of this feature are concerned that the data is now much easier to access and concentrated in a centralized honeypot.
"We do so much to try to protect the privacy of the lightning network but always going to be constantly fighting the tendencies for society to give away information for convenience. I can't begin to tell you how aggregating this information to a single party is an attack on Lightning and the privacy of all individuals as a whole.
I knew this would be inevitable. There's an incentive for users to sell this data to any party and then for that party to sell this data to chain analytics services.
This is just incentives catching up to the privacy flaws that exist. The only steps we can have is to yell out our concerns and point this shit out. I don't think Amboss is trying to be a bad actor, so all that's left is to educate and try to get them to reverse this feature.
I'll do some digging later but it's a sad reality that someone would abuse this sooner rather than later. Just hate to see that it's them."
- Tony Giorgio
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