/* Package lite provides a light client implementation. The concept of light clients was introduced in the Bitcoin white paper. It describes a watcher of distributed consensus process that only validates the consensus algorithm and not the state machine transactions within. Tendermint light clients allow bandwidth & compute-constrained devices, such as smartphones, low-power embedded chips, or other blockchains to efficiently verify the consensus of a Tendermint blockchain. This forms the basis of safe and efficient state synchronization for new network nodes and inter-blockchain communication (where a light client of one Tendermint instance runs in another chain's state machine). In a network that is expected to reliably punish validators for misbehavior by slashing bonded stake and where the validator set changes infrequently, clients can take advantage of this assumption to safely synchronize a lite client without downloading the intervening headers. Light clients (and full nodes) operating in the Proof Of Stake context need a trusted block height from a trusted source that is no older than 1 unbonding window plus a configurable evidence submission synchrony bound. This is called weak subjectivity. Weak subjectivity is required in Proof of Stake blockchains because it is costless for an attacker to buy up voting keys that are no longer bonded and fork the network at some point in its prior history. See Vitalik's post at [Proof of Stake: How I Learned to Love Weak Subjectivity](https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-subjectivity/). NOTE: Tendermint provides a somewhat different (stronger) light client model than Bitcoin under eclipse, since the eclipsing node(s) can only fool the light client if they have two-thirds of the private keys from the last root-of-trust. # Common structures * SignedHeader SignedHeader is a block header along with a commit -- enough validator precommit-vote signatures to prove its validity (> 2/3 of the voting power) given the validator set responsible for signing that header. The hash of the next validator set is included and signed in the SignedHeader. This lets the lite client keep track of arbitrary changes to the validator set, as every change to the validator set must be approved by inclusion in the header and signed in the commit. In the worst case, with every block changing the validators around completely, a lite client can sync up with every block header to verify each validator set change on the chain. In practice, most applications will not have frequent drastic updates to the validator set, so the logic defined in this package for lite client syncing is optimized to use intelligent bisection. # What this package provides This package provides three major things: 1. Client implementation (see client.go) 2. Pure functions to verify a new header (see verifier.go) 3. Secure RPC proxy ## 1. Client implementation (see client.go) Example usage: db, err := dbm.NewGoLevelDB("lite-client-db", dbDir) if err != nil { // handle error } c, err := NewHTTPClient( chainID, TrustOptions{ Period: 504 * time.Hour, // 21 days Height: 100, Hash: header.Hash(), }, "http://localhost:26657", []string{"http://witness1:26657"}, dbs.New(db, ""), ) if err != nil { // handle error } h, err := c.TrustedHeader(100) if err != nil { // handle error } fmt.Println("header", h) Check out other examples in example_test.go ## 2. Pure functions to verify a new header (see verifier.go) Verify function verifies a new header against some trusted header. See https://github.com/tendermint/spec/blob/master/spec/consensus/light-client/verification.md for details. ## 3. Secure RPC proxy Tendermint RPC exposes a lot of info, but a malicious node could return any data it wants to queries, or even to block headers, even making up fake signatures from non-existent validators to justify it. Secure RPC proxy serves as a wrapper, which verifies all the headers, using a light client connected to some other node. See https://docs.tendermint.com/master/tendermint-core/light-client-protocol.html for usage example. */ package lite