The validation subsystem¶

Validator¶

The validator is the component responsible for checking that blocks coming from the network or a baker are valid, w.r.t. the rules defined by the economic protocol, and for selecting the block that it considers to be the current head of the blockchain.

The validator is written as a collection of workers: local event loops communicating with each other via message passing. Workers are spawned and killed dynamically, according to connected peers, incoming blocks to validate, and active (test)chains.

A chain validator worker is launched by the validator for each chain that it considers alive. Each chain validator is responsible for handling blocks that belong to this chain, and select the best head for this chain. A main chain validator is spawned for the main chain that starts at the genesis, a second one when there is an active test chain. Forking a chain is decided from within the economic protocol. In version Alpha, this is only used to try new protocols before self amending the main chain.

The chain validator spawns one peer validator worker per connected peer. This set is updated, grown or shrunk on the fly, according to the connections and disconnections signals from the peer-to-peer component. Each peer validator will treat new head proposals from the associated peer, one at a time, in a loop. In the simple case, when a peer receives a new head proposal that is a direct successor of the current local head, it launches a simple head increment task: it retrieves all the operations and triggers a validation of the block. When the difference between the current head and the examined proposal is more than one block, mostly during the initial bootstrap phase, the peer worker launches a bootstrap pipeline task.

A third scheme is planned (but not yet implemented) for validating alternative chains: the multipass validator. This method is quite more complex, its goal is to detect erroneous blocks as soon as possible, without having to download all the chain data. This will work by first validating the block headers, then the operations that act on the fitness, and finally the remaining operations. The mechanism is actually a bit more flexible, and allows for an arbitrary number of lists of operations. The shell will only consider forks of a given length, that is exported by the protocol, so that block headers and operations are validated in the context of an ancestor block that is in a close enough time window. In version Alpha, the check performed on block headers is that the baking slots, baker signatures and timestamp deltas are right. It can also detect too large fitness gaps, as the fitness difference between two consecutive blocks is bounded in Alpha. The operations that act on fitness are endorsements, whose checks consist in verifying the endorsement slots and endorsers’ signatures. For that to be sound, the fork limit is set to not allow rewinding before the baking and endorsing slots are set.

Each of these three peer validator tasks (head increment, bootstrap pipeline or multipass) will interact with the distributed DB to get the data they need (block headers and operations). When they have everything needed for a block, they will call the block validator.

The block validator validates blocks (currently in sequence), assuming that all the necessary data have already been retrieved from the peer-to-peer network. When a block is valid, it will notify the corresponding chain validator, that may update its head. In this case, the chain validator will propagate this information to its associated prevalidator, and may decide to kill or spawn the test network according to the protocol’s decision.

Prevalidator¶

To each chain validator is associated a prevalidator (this may become an option in the future, to allow running nodes on machines with less RAM), that is responsible for the transmission of operations for this chain over the peer-to-peer network.

To prevent spam, this prevalidator must select the set of operations that it considers valid, and the ones that it chooses to broadcast. This is done by constantly baking a dummy block, floating over the current head, and growing as new operations are received.

Operations that get included can be broadcast unconditionally.

Operations that are included are classified into categories. Some (such as bad signatures or garbage byte sequences) are dismissed. They are put in a temporary bounded set for quick rejection, and the peer that sent it is kicked. Some other operations are temporarily refused: they come too soon or too late. For instance, in Alpha, contracts have counters, and operations with counters in the future are classified as temporarily refused. A malicious peer could easily flood the mempool with such operations, so they are put in a bounded set. Another bounded set is also kept for a third kind of non inclusion: operations that could be valid in another branch.

Distributed DB¶

The gathering of resources needed for validation is centralized in the distributed db. This component allocates a slot per requested resource, whose priority depends on the number of peer validators requesting it.