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Informational 12 Bitcoin

Revert dev-uniform padding.

Public commit record

What the developer wrote

Authored by Rusty Russell

68/100 · Adequate
Revert dev-uniform padding.

This reverts:

2252bda0de3cb1f48e7efaaeb061efe32462d007 "connectd: gate uniform message padding behind --dev-uniform-padding"
f844eb0864b6048e3a27024e29b2c92aff919cdb "lightningd: add dev-uniform-padding flag to lightningd".
b7c05f604add41cda7e77e58bc25ac32387488b6 "test: add flag to test_constant_packet_size"

Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
✓ Descriptive subject✓ Provides detailed explanatory context✓ Mentions testing or verification
The short version

What changed, and why it matters

This commit removes an experimental developer-only feature called 'uniform padding' that was intended to make network traffic between Lightning nodes look more uniform as a defense against traffic analysis. It is a clean revert of three earlier commits and does not introduce any security vulnerability or fix one. The feature was gated behind a hidden developer flag and was never active in normal operation.

Recommended action

No security action required. Treat as a normal feature revert. If traffic-analysis resistance is a project goal, track the revert in release notes and consider whether an improved padding design will replace it.

Security signals we found

01

Removal of an experimental traffic-analysis countermeasure (uniform message padding)

02

No changes to authentication, encryption, parsing, or state handling

03

No bug fix or vulnerability remediation evident in the diff

Risk score

Why this scored 12/100

Our methodology →
Potential impact 0/30
Exploitability 0/25
Stealth signal 0/15
Affected reach 0/15
Confidence 8/10
Evidence quality 4/5
Human-validated context

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