You can unlock your HTLC without telling the other party the secret. You just close the channel by yourself and tell everyone else the secret and then ddosing so the other party can't redeem his HTLC before his HTLC expires.
Do you not see the contradiction in your statement? You can’t spend your htlc without revealing the secret to the other party. If your stealing procedure involves ddosing random unknown party from being able to access any internet whatsoever to lock them out of minuscule amounts lightning payments are used for - good luck with that.
You only need to ddos the lightning network so it won't record their HTLC when it expires. There is no need to ddos them, though I would argue it would be equally easy to do. And so while the other party will eventually see the secret on the block chain, they can't get their HTLC unlocked on the network before it expires.
And the lightning network has already been easily ddosed! We will see it happen more often if the lightning network ever gets bigger. This isn't some hypothetical situation.
this is not even a thing. lightning network is collection of independent nodes, there is no registry of payments and channels, every node keeps their own record.
> And so while the other party will eventually see the secret on the block chain, they can't get their HTLC unlocked on the network before it expires.
why? if a party is stuck in a payment and especially if they notice they are getting attacked - they will take steps to mitigate. the moment commitment with secret is broadcast and in the worst case - the moment it gets confirmed on chain the other party will know the secret and can unlock their htlc. the risk is essentially the same as with deep reorgs - very low because those are very rare events. and the hassle is most definitely not worth the value of a stolen micropayment, which is the primary purpose of LN.