lightning-dev

[BOLT Draft] Onion Routing Spec

[BOLT Draft] Onion Routing Spec

Original Postby Olaoluwa Osuntokun

Posted on: September 5, 2016 19:24 UTC

In an email conversation, Christian Decker and Laolu Osuntokun discussed the outstanding issues related to the onion routing protocol.

They agreed to defer some of the issues until later versions, such as key-rotation policies, backlog of seen shared secrets, and payload formatting. The full specification of the rendezvous handshake was also deferred to a later version, as they may discover limitations or issues with the current format. For now, they decided to keep the payload sizes fixed at 20 bytes for per-hop and 1024 byte for end-to-end payload, but they acknowledged potential bandwidth overhead in high frequency settings. They also considered using a generic encoding, such as JSON or msgpack, to make the protocol flexible. Finally, they discussed the process for upgrading spec drafts, which they plan to hammer out in Milan.