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Informational 20 Bitcoin

Add event for failed payment relay (#3244)

Public commit record

What the developer wrote

Authored by Bastien Teinturier

88/100 · Strong
Add event for failed payment relay (#3244)

We add an event when a payment could not be relayed and indicates that
we may need to add liquidity towards the next node. It is really hard
to figure it out in the context of a single payment though, so this
event does not by itself mean that liquidity should be allocated. The
listeners should collect several events and regularly query the state
of existing channels with our peers, and network graph data for remote
nodes, to create good heuristics for allocating liquidity. Otherwise,
it would be trivial for malicious senders to game routing nodes into
allocating liquidity "for free" towards them, which could result in
financial loss.
✓ Descriptive subject✓ Names a concrete action or component✓ Provides detailed explanatory context✓ Explains rationale or failure mode✓ Links an issue, advisory, or supporting reference
The short version

What changed, and why it matters

This commit adds new internal event notifications when a Lightning payment cannot be relayed through a node. It is a defensive, observability-only change: it does not alter payment handling logic, but gives node operators signals they can use to decide where to allocate channel liquidity. The commit message explicitly warns that the events can be gamed by malicious senders and should not be acted on blindly.

Recommended action

No immediate security action required. Operators using these events should implement the heuristic safeguards described in the commit message before automating liquidity allocation.

Security signals we found

01

New event emission only; no change to authorization or failure handling

02

Commit message explicitly notes risk of malicious senders gaming liquidity signals

03

Events are advisory and require external heuristic processing

04

No cryptographic, network, or consensus changes

Risk score

Why this scored 20/100

Our methodology →
Potential impact 2/30
Exploitability 1/25
Stealth signal 1/15
Affected reach 2/15
Confidence 9/10
Evidence quality 5/5
Human-validated context

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