LIGHTNING-CREATEONION(7)

NAME
lightning-createonion - Low-level command to create a custom onion

SYNOPSIS
createonion hops assocdata [session_key]

DESCRIPTION
The createonion RPC command allows the caller to create a custom onion with custom payloads at each hop in the route. A custom onion can be used to implement protocol extensions that are not supported by c-lightning directly. The hops parameter is a JSON list of dicts, each specifying a node and the payload destined for that node. The following is an example of a 3 hop onion:
    [
        {
            "pubkey": "022d223620a359a47ff7f7ac447c85c46c923da53389221a0054c11c1e3ca31d59",
            "payload": "00000067000001000100000000000003e90000007b000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
        }, {
            "pubkey": "035d2b1192dfba134e10e540875d366ebc8bc353d5aa766b80c090b39c3a5d885d",
            "payload": "00000067000003000100000000000003e800000075000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
        }, {
            "style": "legacy",
            "pubkey": "0382ce59ebf18be7d84677c2e35f23294b9992ceca95491fcf8a56c6cb2d9de199",
            "payload": "00000067000003000100000000000003e800000075000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
        }
    ]
The hops parameter is very similar to the result from getroute however it needs to be modified slightly. The following is the getroute response from which the above hops parameter was generated:
    [
        {
            "id": "022d223620a359a47ff7f7ac447c85c46c923da53389221a0054c11c1e3ca31d59",
            "channel": "103x2x1",
            "direction": 1,
            "msatoshi": 1002,
            "amount_msat": "1002msat",
            "delay": 21,
            "style": "legacy"
        }, {
            "id": "035d2b1192dfba134e10e540875d366ebc8bc353d5aa766b80c090b39c3a5d885d",
            "channel": "103x1x1",
            "direction": 0,
            "msatoshi": 1001,
            "amount_msat": "1001msat",
            "delay": 15,
            "style": "legacy"
        }, {
            "id": "0382ce59ebf18be7d84677c2e35f23294b9992ceca95491fcf8a56c6cb2d9de199",
            "channel": "103x3x1",
            "direction": 0,
            "msatoshi": 1000,
            "amount_msat": "1000msat",
            "delay": 9,
            "style": "legacy"
        }
    ]

    •   Notice that the payload in the hops parameter is the hex-encoded version of the parameters in the getroute response.

    •   The payloads are shifted left by one, i.e., payload 0 in createonion corresponds to payload 1 from getroute.

    •   The final payload is a copy of the last payload sans channel
These rules are directly derived from the onion construction. Please refer BOLT 04 (https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/master/04-onion-routing.md) for details and rationale. The assocdata parameter specifies the associated data that the onion should commit to. If the onion is to be used to send a payment later it MUST match the payment_hash of the payment in order to be valid. The optional session_key parameter can be used to specify a secret that is used to generate the shared secrets used to encrypt the onion for each hop. It should only be used for testing or if a specific shared secret is important. If not specified it will be securely generated internally, and the shared secrets will be returned.

RETURN VALUE
On success, an object containing the onion and the shared secrets will be returned. Otherwise an error will be reported. The following example is the result of calling createonion with the above hops parameter:
    {
        "onion": "0003f3f80d2142b953319336d2fe4097[...✂...]6af33fcf4fb113bce01f56dd62248a9e5fcbbfba35c",
        "shared_secrets": [
            "88ce98c73e4d9293ab1797b0a913fe9bca0213a566252047d01b8af6da871f3e",
            "4474d296810e57bd460ef8b83d2e7d288321f8a99ff7686f87384699747bcfc4",
            "2a862e4123e01799a732be487fbce297f7dc7cc1467e410f18369cfee476adc2"
        ]
    }
The onion corresponds to 1366 hex-encoded bytes. Each shared secret consists of 32 hex-encoded bytes. Both arguments can be passed on to sendonion.

AUTHOR
Christian Decker <decker.christian@gmail.com> is mainly responsible.

SEE ALSO
lightning-sendonion(7), lightning-getroute(7)

RESOURCES
Main web site: https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning