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Informational 19 Bitcoin

Rework max commitment transaction balance debug assertions

Public commit record

What the developer wrote

Authored by Wilmer Paulino

73/100 · Adequate
Rework max commitment transaction balance debug assertions

These assertions made sure that our balance would never dip below the
reserve, and if they ever were, that the balance must only move towards
meeting the reserve. With splicing, this doesn't always work, as a node
that is not interested in contributing could end up below the reserve of
the post-splice channel. Therefore, we rework these assertions such that
we only keep track of the previous commitment transaction balance, and
compare against the current, ensuring that our balance only increases
when below the reserve.
✓ Specific, descriptive subject✓ Names a concrete action or component✓ Provides detailed explanatory context
The short version

What changed, and why it matters

This commit changes internal bookkeeping checks that only run in debug builds. The old checks could incorrectly fire and crash a developer/test build when a Lightning channel was spliced (resized) in a way that left one party temporarily below the required reserve balance. The new checks relax that rule for splicing by only requiring balances move upward when below reserve, rather than always staying above reserve. It is a robustness fix for an assertion, not a fix for a live-network security vulnerability.

Recommended action

No immediate action required. Treat as a normal correctness/robustness patch. Reviewers may want to confirm the new monotonicity assertion still catches actual balance-drift bugs in debug builds and that the splicing test covers both holder and counterparty below-reserve cases.

Security signals we found

01

Debug-only assertion relaxation for splicing correctness

02

Channel reserve invariant adjusted to allow temporary below-reserve state after splice

03

New regression test covering splice where counterparty balance falls below reserve

Risk score

Why this scored 19/100

Our methodology →
Potential impact 2/30
Exploitability 0/25
Stealth signal 0/15
Affected reach 5/15
Confidence 8/10
Evidence quality 4/5
Human-validated context

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