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Moderate 62 Bitcoin

Handle overflowing route-hint fee aggregates

Public commit record

What the developer wrote

Authored by Elias Rohrer

73/100 · Adequate
Handle overflowing route-hint fee aggregates

Crafted route hints can overflow aggregate downstream proportional fees
when the payer disables the routing fee cap. Treat such paths as
unusable so route finding fails cleanly instead of panicking.

Co-Authored-By: HAL 9000
Signed-off-by: Elias Rohrer <dev@tnull.de>
✓ Descriptive subject✓ Names a concrete action or component✓ Provides detailed explanatory context✓ Names security-relevant behavior explicitly
The short version

What changed, and why it matters

This patch fixes a crash bug in the Lightning routing code. When a user disabled the normal cap on routing fees, a malicious or specially crafted payment invoice containing route hints with extremely high proportional fees could cause an internal arithmetic overflow. Previously this overflow made the program panic; now the code detects the overflow and treats that route as unusable, so routing fails cleanly instead of crashing.

Recommended action

Apply the patch. It is a targeted defensive fix with a regression test and low risk of functional regression because it only changes behavior on the previously panicking overflow path. Users who do not disable the routing fee cap are not affected by the panic, but should still update as part of normal maintenance.

Security signals we found

01

Integer overflow in fee aggregation previously caused panic (denial of service)

02

Trigger requires attacker-controlled invoice route hints with large proportional fees

03

Only exploitable when the routing fee cap is disabled by the payer

04

Patch converts panic path into graceful route-failure path

05

Regression test added: aggregated_prop_fee_overflow_fails_route

Risk score

Why this scored 62/100

Our methodology →
Potential impact 18/30
Exploitability 14/25
Stealth signal 8/15
Affected reach 10/15
Confidence 8/10
Evidence quality 4/5
Human-validated context

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