Jacek Sieka 75c7195bfd
Backfill only up to MIN_EPOCHS_FOR_BLOCK_REQUESTS blocks (#4421)
When backfilling, we only need to download blocks that are newer than
MIN_EPOCHS_FOR_BLOCK_REQUESTS - the rest cannot reliably be fetched from
the network and does not have to be provided to others.

This change affects only trusted-node-synced clients - genesis sync
continues to work as before (because it needs to construct a state by
building it from genesis).

Those wishing to complete a backfill should do so with era files
instead.
2022-12-23 08:42:55 +01:00
..

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