Lightning tightens invoice rules after reported attack made Bitcoin withdrawals look unpaid
Lightning developers updated the BOLT11 invoice standard to require rejection of invoices with missing or repeated payment-hash or payment-secret fields, preventing software from interpreting a signed request differently. The change followed a reported attack on a Telegram peer-to-peer bot: mismatched hash handling reportedly made completed Bitcoin withdrawals appear unpaid, potentially enabling further payouts. The standard requires exactly one of each field, even if duplicate values are identical. lnd added duplicate payment-hash rejection in releases v0.20.5-beta and v0.21.4-beta, while a broader payment-secret decoder proposal remained open as of Oct. 27. Operators are advised to reject ambiguous invoices and align withdrawal accounting with the hash used by their node.
