PQLN: Post-Quantum Security for the Bitcoin Lightning Network's Off-Chain Surfaces

Abstract

A cryptographically relevant quantum computer will break the elliptic-curve cryptography behind Bitcoin and its Lightning Network, the most widely used payment channel network. Even a post-quantum consensus upgrade of Bitcoin would not cover Lightning's off-chain surfaces, so its gossip, peer transport, invoices, payment onions, and offers need separate protection. An adversary can already record Lightning's encrypted traffic today and decrypt it once such a computer exists. Lightning can therefore move to post-quantum cryptography now, without waiting for Bitcoin, and stop such harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks along with node impersonation, invoice forgery, and payment deanonymization. In this paper, we propose PQLN, a hybrid post-quantum extension of Lightning that protects all of these surfaces with the lattice-based standards ML-DSA and ML-KEM. PQLN distributes post-quantum node identities through Lightning's gossip, hybridizes the transport handshake, adds post-quantum signatures to invoices, commits post-quantum keys in offers, and makes payment onions hybrid. Since post-quantum material is much larger than its elliptic-curve counterpart, we introduce techniques that fit it into Lightning's existing message formats and size limits. We analyze the security of PQLN against a quantum adversary and implement it in rust-lightning, a major Lightning implementation. Our evaluation with real Lightning nodes shows that PQLN nodes interoperate with unmodified nodes. The added cryptographic operations take at most 0.33 milliseconds, and the main cost is communication, since gossip data grows about tenfold with ML-DSA and about fourfold with the smaller Falcon. To our knowledge, PQLN is the first post-quantum design, implementation, and evaluation for Lightning.