Adversarial Lightning: 12 Real-World Failure Cases
This talk explores the Lightning Network from an adversarial perspective, based on real-world failures and vulnerabilities observed in Lightning implementations. Drawing primarily from documented findings by Matt Morehouse, it presents twelve concrete scenarios where nodes failed under hostile conditions, including denial-of-service vectors, fee and replacement edge cases, state desynchronization bugs, and gossip abuse. The goal is to help developers and operators better understand Lightning’s attack surfaces and threat model.
