Weekly Dev Update #47

2020-06-16 — 5 min read

Summary

The team spent the week bug-fixing and stress-testing the Testnet. Testnet 3 is being prepared for imminent deployment, contingent on some Binance Chain node reliability issues being rectified.

Node Account Jail

If a node goes offline then the protocol suffers reliability because it requires availability. To improve this, the concept of Jail was added, which temporarily marks a node as unavailable if they fail a key-gen or key-sign and it will not be selected for subsequent key-generation or key-signing. This in addition to the presecribed penalities — which should discourage bad behaviour in the first place.

The mechanism is:

Jailed nodes can not be selected to be a key signer. When a node gets blamed for failing to do a keysign, they get 20 blocks in “jail”, which means they won’t be selected in a keysign for that time. So if 1/3 of the nodes are bad, every 20 blocks, the good nodes will blame the bad nodes, giving them slash points, and then giving the network 20 blocks of freedom to send transactions without the bad nodes inhibiting them (ie more resilient).

Jailed nodes will not be selected to be churned into the network. When a node fails a keygen, they go to jail for 6 hours (in addition to slashing their bond). This gives other nodes a chance to churn in during this time (retries every hour).

Jailed nodes can not withdraw funds via a leave memo. Thismeans they have an additional opportunity cost during the time they are jailed. This will reduce the likelihood of intentional malicous beahviour.

THORNode

Bugfixes from testnets, as well as some quality and feature inclusions from testing.

Testnet Bug Fixes

Other improvements

Midgard

Bugfixes and feature requests as required for the clients.

TSS

The team have commissioned work to build out a GG20 TSS Proof-of-Concept that could improve reliability, scalability and solve for node-account blame.

Clients

BEPSwap Client

Numerous UI/UX tweaks based on community feedback

ASGARDEX Client

Ongoing work to port in UI components.

ASGARDEX Libraries

Numerous changes, as well as a new library asgardex-crypto which allows an ASGARDEX-Keystore file to be encrypted and decrypted.

The BIP44 path will use 931 as the coin-type.// Crypto Constants for ASGARDEX
const AsgardexBIP39Phrase = 'asgardex'
const BIP44Path = "m/44'/931'/0'/0/0"
const cipher = 'aes-128-ctr'
const kdf = 'pbkdf2'
const prf = 'hmac-sha256'
const dklen = 32
const c = 262144
const hashFunction = 'sha256'
const meta = 'asgardex-keystore'

The design is slightly different to other keystore libraries, since it encrypts the phrase, instead of the seed:

Typically keystore files encrypt a seed to a file, however this is not appropriate or UX friendly, since the phrase cannot be recovered after the fact.

[entropy] -> [phrase] -> [seed] -> [privateKey] -> [publicKey] -> [address]

Instead, ASGARDEX-CRYPTO stores the phrase in a keystore file, then decrypts and passes this phrase to other clients:

[keystore] -> ASGARDEX-CRYPTO -> [phrase] -> ChainClient

The ChainClients can then convert this into their respective key-pairs and addresses. Users can also export their phrases after the fact, ensuring they have saved it securely. This could enhance UX onboarding since users aren’t forced to write their phrases down immediately for empty or test wallets, and makes the wallet chain-agnostic.