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With this PR we add basic forwarding functionality for onion messages. It builds on PR #9868.

It adds OnionMessagePayload struct to the lnwire package.
It also depends on the not yet merged (PR 68)[https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-onion/pull/68] in the lightning-onion package. For now it uses that package from a forked version.

The msgmux endpoint for onion messages is updated to parse the onion message packet, and forward the onion based on the acquired information.

The SubscribeOnionMessages endpoint is updated to pass along any decrypted information. This endpoint is currently solely meant for itests, although it could have practical use in the future.

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Summary of Changes

Hello @gijswijs, I'm Gemini Code Assist1! I'm currently reviewing this pull request and will post my feedback shortly. In the meantime, here's a summary to help you and other reviewers quickly get up to speed!

This pull request introduces the foundational functionality for forwarding onion messages within the Lightning Network. It integrates a new OnionMessage wire protocol message, enables its routing through the existing Sphinx onion processing infrastructure, and provides RPC endpoints for sending and subscribing to these messages. This work lays the groundwork for future application-layer protocols like BOLT12 offers, allowing for privacy-preserving communication beyond just payments.

Highlights

  • Onion Message Wire Protocol: Introduces a new lnwire.OnionMessage type to the wire protocol, enabling the transmission of onion-encrypted messages between Lightning Network nodes. This message type is distinct from HTLC-carrying onion packets and is designed for application-layer communication.
  • Sphinx Onion Processing Integration: Extends the existing Sphinx onion processing logic within htlcswitch/hop to correctly parse and handle OnionMessage payloads. This includes adapting the hop iterator to recognize onion messages, extracting forwarding information (such as the NextNodeID for node-based routing), and performing message-specific TLV validations.
  • New RPC Endpoints for Onion Messages: Adds SendOnionMessage and SubscribeOnionMessages to the LND RPC API. These new endpoints allow external applications and users to programmatically send onion messages to peers and subscribe to a stream of incoming onion messages, facilitating the development of new privacy-preserving communication features.
  • Dedicated Message Endpoint and Forwarding Logic: Implements a new onion_message.OnionEndpoint that integrates with the msgmux to process incoming lnwire.OnionMessages. This endpoint is responsible for decrypting the onion blob, determining if the message is for the local node or needs forwarding, and then either dispatching it to subscribers or relaying it to the next hop in the blinded path.
  • Enhanced Blinded Path Handling: Introduces specific logic for blinded paths within onion messages, including the addition of NextNodeID to ForwardingInfo. This ensures that onion messages, which do not carry payment-related information like CLTV deltas or amounts, are correctly processed and forwarded along their intended blinded routes.
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Code Review

This pull request introduces onion message forwarding, a significant feature that touches multiple parts of the codebase. The changes are generally well-structured, with new functionality encapsulated in the onion_message package and corresponding updates to lnwire, htlcswitch, and the RPC layer. The inclusion of integration tests for both direct and forwarded onion messages is a great addition. I've identified a few issues that need attention: a critical bug in handling dummy hops for onion messages, a high-severity issue with TLV decoding that could lead to panics, and a medium-severity issue regarding message routing logic that could cause confusion and potential bugs. Addressing these will improve the correctness and maintainability of the new functionality.

@saubyk saubyk added this to lnd v0.20 Jul 22, 2025
@saubyk saubyk moved this to In progress in lnd v0.20 Jul 22, 2025
@gijswijs gijswijs force-pushed the onion-messaging-1 branch 5 times, most recently from 9157266 to 83a36aa Compare September 1, 2025 13:53
@gijswijs gijswijs force-pushed the onion-messaging-1 branch 2 times, most recently from 953b2d8 to 3f475ce Compare September 16, 2025 09:48
@saubyk saubyk added this to the v0.21.0 milestone Sep 24, 2025
@saubyk saubyk added this to v0.21 Sep 24, 2025
@saubyk saubyk removed this from lnd v0.20 Sep 24, 2025
@saubyk saubyk moved this to In progress in v0.21 Sep 24, 2025
// forwarding information for an onion message. It contains either
// next_node_id or short_channel_id for each non-final node. It MAY contain
// the path_id for the final node.
bytes encrypted_recipient_data = 5;
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If this is intended for users to consume, shouldn't this be decrypted?

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I'm not sure we even need this OnionMessageUpdate to be honest.
I needed it so that I could have itests that allowed me to test e2e onion messaging: Use SendOnionMessage to kick things of at Alice's end, and use SubscribeOnionMessages at Dave's end to see if everything comes through as expected.

That being said, if somebody would like to build something on top of onion message support (like LNDK is built on top of SubscribeCustomMessages), you would need SubscribeOnionMessages and you would want this to be decrypted.

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Since #9868 has been merged, I think this needs to be updated, wanna take a look.

@ziggie1984 ziggie1984 changed the base branch from master to 0-21-0-staging October 18, 2025 14:48
@gijswijs gijswijs force-pushed the onion-messaging-1 branch 2 times, most recently from 5a7e61d to dbb64f4 Compare October 30, 2025 12:43
@yyforyongyu yyforyongyu force-pushed the 0-21-0-staging branch 2 times, most recently from 86fd4b7 to 57eb251 Compare November 4, 2025 11:50
gijswijs and others added 15 commits January 7, 2026 17:14
In this commit, we add two new fundamental data structures: Future[T]
and Promise[T].

A future is a response that might be ready at some point in the future.
This is already a common pattern in Go, we just make a type safe wrapper
around the typical operations: block w/ a timeout, add a call back for
execution, pipeline the response to a new future.

A promise is an intent to complete a future. Typically the caller
receives the future, and the callee is able to complete the future using
a promise.
In this commit, we add the actual Actor implementation. We define a
series of types and interfaces, that in concert, describe our actor. An
actor has some ID, a reference (used to send messages to it), and also a
set of defined messages that it'll accept.

An actor can be implemented using a simple function if it's stateless.
Otherwise, a struct can implement the Receive method, and handle its
internal message passing and state that way.
In this commit, we add the actor system (along with the receiptionist)
and the router.

An actor can be registered with the system, which allows other callers
to locate it to send message to it via the receptionist. Custom routers
can be created for when there're actors that rely on the same service
key and also req+resp type. This can be used to implement something
similar to a worker pool.
In this commit, we add a series of examples that show how the package
can be used in the wild. They can be run as normal Example tests.
In this commit, we add a readme which serves as a general introduction
to the pacakge, and also the motivation of the package. It serves as a
manual for developers that may wish to interact with the package.
This commit introduces a new Mailbox interface that abstracts the
message queue implementation for actors. Previously, actors used a
direct channel for their mailbox, which limited flexibility and made
it difficult to implement alternative mailbox strategies.

The new Mailbox interface provides methods for sending, receiving, and
draining messages, with full context support for cancellation. The
Receive method leverages Go 1.23's iter.Seq pattern, providing a clean
iterator-based API that allows natural for-range loops over messages.

The ChannelMailbox implementation maintains the existing channel-based
behavior while conforming to the new interface. It stores the actor's
context internally, ensuring both caller and actor contexts are
properly respected during send and receive operations. This simplifies
context handling compared to complex context merging approaches.

This abstraction enables future implementations such as priority
mailboxes, persistent mailboxes, or bounded mailboxes with overflow
strategies, without requiring changes to the actor implementation.
This commit adds thorough test coverage for the new Mailbox interface
and ChannelMailbox implementation. The tests verify correct behavior
across various scenarios including successful sends, context
cancellation, mailbox closure, and concurrent operations.

The test suite specifically validates that the mailbox respects both
the caller's context and the actor's context during send and receive
operations. This ensures that actors properly shut down when their
context is cancelled, and that callers can cancel operations without
affecting the actor's lifecycle.

Additional tests cover edge cases such as zero-capacity mailboxes
(which default to a capacity of 1), draining messages after closure,
and concurrent sends from multiple goroutines. The concurrent test
uses 10 senders each sending 100 messages to verify thread-safety
and proper message ordering.

All tests pass with the race detector enabled, confirming the
implementation is free from data races.
This commit refactors the Actor implementation to use the new Mailbox
interface instead of directly managing a channel. This change
significantly simplifies the actor's message processing loop and
improves separation of concerns.

The main changes include replacing the direct channel field with a
Mailbox interface, updating NewActor to create a ChannelMailbox
instance, and refactoring the process method to use the iterator
pattern provided by mailbox.Receive. The new implementation uses a
clean for-range loop over the mailbox's message iterator, eliminating
the complex select statement that previously handled both message
reception and context cancellation.

The Tell and Ask methods in actorRefImpl have been simplified to use
the mailbox's Send method, which internally handles both the caller's
context and the actor's context. This eliminates the need for complex
select statements in these methods and ensures consistent context
handling throughout the actor system.

Message draining during shutdown is now handled through the mailbox's
Drain method, providing a cleaner separation between normal message
processing and cleanup operations. The actor still properly sends
unprocessed messages to the Dead Letter Office and completes pending
promises with appropriate errors during shutdown.
The new wire message defines the OnionMessagePayload, FinalHopPayload,
ReplyPath, and related TLV encoding/decoding logic.
Update lightning-onion to commit that includes onion-messaging support.
Adds the NewNonFinalBlindedRouteDataOnionMessage function to create
blinded route data specifically for onion messages.
Initialize a sphinx router without persistent replay protection logging
for onion message processing. Onion messages don't require replay
protection since they don't involve payment routing.
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Abdulkbk commented Jan 7, 2026

I've addressed all comments from both @ziggie1984 and @Abdulkbk, also the ones that were made on the initial version that still depended on the htlcswitch as far as those comments were still relevant. I will now proceed to create a PR for lightning-onion for supporting a mode without replay protection. After that we can change the commit in this PR that adds the sphinx router for onion messages that currently still has replay protection.

Thank you. I started looking at it again yesterday, had a couple of comments/questions on pending that I'm yet to finalize.

Introduce OnionPeerActor to handle the sending of onion message to each
peer. The actor is registered with the receptionist pattern to enable
message routing through the actor system. Also adds onion message
feature bits to the protocol, so that the actor is only spawned when the
peer supports onion messages.
Add onion message forwarding capability using the OnionPeerActor for
communication. Messages are routed through a receptionist pattern where
each peer has a dedicated OnionPeerActor for handling message sends.

The OnionEndpoint uses the sphinx router for decoding and decrypting the
onion message packet and the encrypted recipient data in the payload of
the onion messages.
Change SubscribeOnionMessages RPC to return OnionMessageUpdate instead
of OnionMessage, including the decrypted payload to enable payload
inspection in integration tests. The encrypted recipient data is still
not decrypted here.
Verify that onion messages can be correctly forwarded through a
multi-hop path by testing the complete flow from sender to recipient
through intermediate nodes in various scenarios:

1. forwarding by node id
2. forwarding by scid
3. the common onion message scenario where two blinded paths are
concatenated.

The code from the onionmessage unit tests that could be reused is
extracted in a testhelper package.
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my feedback is mostly around tests.

I noticed you recently pushed some fixups, I'll follow again and resolve anyone that has been addressed.


const (
// finalHopPayloadStart is the inclusive beginning of the tlv type
// range that is reserved for payloads for the final hop.
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Maybe update the Validate method to take that into account?.

// Validate performs validation of items added to the final hop's payload in an
// onion. This function returns an error if a tlv is not within the range
// reserved for final payload.
func (f *FinalHopPayload) Validate() error {
	if f.TLVType < finalHopPayloadStart {
		return fmt.Errorf("%w: %v", ErrNotFinalPayload, f.TLVType)
	}

	return nil
}

encryptedDataTLVType, &o.EncryptedData,
),
// Add a record for invoice request sub-namespace so that we
// won't fail on the even tlv - reasoning above.
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I think the reasoning is below.


- [Basic Support](https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/pull/9868) for onion
[messaging forwarding] (https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/pull/10089)
[messaging forwarding](https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/pull/10089)
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nit: break into separate sentences.

server.go Outdated

// TODO(gijs): remove the memory replay log once lightning-onion
// supports it.
sphinxRouterNoReplayLog := sphinx.NewRouter(
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I will volunteer to take on this. cc: @gijswijs.

// Find the actor.
actorOpt := findPeerActor(receptionist, pubKeyArr)

require.True(t, actorOpt.IsSome(), "actor should be found")
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nit: we can compare the actor refs if we return one from SpawnOnionPeerActor, something like:

ref := SpawnOnionPeerActor(system, sender, pubKeyArr)
require.Equal(t, ref, actorOpt.UnwrapOrFail(t))

resolver NodeIDResolver, tc processOnionMessageTest) {

blindedPath := testhelpers.BuildBlindedPath(t, tc.hopsToBlind)
msg, expectedCypherTexts := testhelpers.BuildOnionMessage(
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nit: expectedCipherTexts

}

// Case 1 Data: Forward Action Success.
nextNode1 := fn.NewLeft[*btcec.PublicKey, lnwire.ShortChannelID](
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micro nit: I think we can improve clarity by renaming:
nextNode1 -> nextNodeByPubKey
nextNode2 -> nextNodeWithOverride
nextNode3 -> nextNodeBySCID

}

func (r *GraphNodeResolver) RemotePubFromSCID(scid lnwire.ShortChannelID,
) (*btcec.PublicKey, error) {
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how about as this goes against the guide:

func (r *GraphNodeResolver) RemotePubFromSCID(
	scid lnwire.ShortChannelID) (*btcec.PublicKey, error) {
...

isProcessedSuccessful = false
}

isProcessedSuccessful = true
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I noticed we set this to false just above, then set it to true here. This means there is no point in setting it to false since we only log and not return in the error check above.

}
}

func TestOnionEndpointSendMessageRouting(t *testing.T) {
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missing godoc

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