Etan Kissling 40e89937c5
segregate sync committee messages by period / fork (#4953)
`SyncCommitteeMsgPool` grouped messages by their `beacon_block_root`.
This is problematic around sync committee period boundaries and forks.
Around sync committee period boundaries, members from both the current
and next sync committee may sign the same `beacon_block_root`; mixing
the signatures from both committees together is a mistake. Likewise,
around fork transitions, the `signing_root` changes, so those messages
also need to be segregated.
2023-05-17 07:55:55 +03:00
..

Gossip Processing

This folder holds a collection of modules to:

  • validate raw gossip data before
    • rebroadcasting it (potentially aggregated)
    • sending it to one of the consensus object pools

Validation

Gossip validation is different from consensus verification in particular for blocks.

There are multiple consumers of validated consensus objects:

  • a ValidationResult.Accept output triggers rebroadcasting in libp2p
    • We jump into method validate(PubSub, Message) in libp2p/protocols/pubsub/pubsub.nim
    • which was called by rpcHandler(GossipSub, PubSubPeer, RPCMsg)
  • a blockValidator message enqueues the validated object to the processing queue in block_processor
    • blockQueue: AsyncQueue[BlockEntry] (shared with request_manager and sync_manager)
    • This queue is then regularly processed to be made available to the consensus object pools.
  • a xyzValidator message adds the validated object to a pool in eth2_processor
    • Attestations (unaggregated and aggregated) get collected into batches.
    • Once a threshold is exceeded or after a timeout, they get validated together using BatchCrypto.

Security concerns

As the first line of defense in Nimbus, modules must be able to handle bursts of data that may come:

  • from malicious nodes trying to DOS us
  • from long periods of non-finality, creating lots of forks, attestations