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Low 28 Bitcoin

Shakedown zero reserve channels

Public commit record

What the developer wrote

Authored by Leo Nash

35/100 · Opaque
Shakedown zero reserve channels
✓ Descriptive subject! No meaningful explanatory body
The short version

What changed, and why it matters

This commit adds a large set of unit tests for a new 'zero reserve' channel feature in the Lightning Dev Kit. Zero-reserve channels let one peer spend almost all of its channel balance, which is normally disallowed because it can leave a channel with no money left to pay on-chain fees during a dispute. The tests exercise the new APIs, check that balances and fee buffers are computed correctly, and verify that dangerous edge cases (such as a commitment transaction with no outputs at all) are rejected or handled safely. The commit itself only contains test code, so it does not introduce a live vulnerability, but it documents behavior that could be risky if the production logic has bugs.

Recommended action

Treat this as a test-only commit. Review the corresponding production implementation of create_channel_to_trusted_peer_0reserve, accept_inbound_channel_from_trusted_peer, and the reserve/fee-buffer calculations in the channel/channelmanager modules to ensure the safety checks exercised here are actually enforced. If the production code is already merged, run these tests and consider additional fuzzing around zero-reserve edge cases.

Security signals we found

01

Tests for zero-reserve channels, which relax the normal channel_reserve_satoshis security boundary

02

Tests verify rejection paths when HTLCs would leave a commitment transaction with no outputs

03

Tests cover force-close behavior and anchor-output handling under zero-reserve conditions

04

Tests combine zero-reserve with zero-conf, another trust-dependent feature

05

No production code changes; only unit-test additions

Risk score

Why this scored 28/100

Our methodology →
Potential impact 5/30
Exploitability 5/25
Stealth signal 5/15
Affected reach 5/15
Confidence 5/10
Evidence quality 3/5
Human-validated context

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