Since the light client work introduced in v0.33 it appears full nodes
are no longer fully verifying commit signatures during block execution -
they stop after +2/3. See in VerifyCommit:
0c7fd316eb/types/validator_set.go (L700-L703)
This means proposers can propose blocks that contain valid +2/3
signatures and then the rest of the signatures can be whatever they
want. They can claim that all the other validators signed just by
including a CommitSig with arbitrary signature data. While this doesn't
seem to impact safety of Tendermint per se, it means that Commits may
contain a lot of invalid data. This is already true of blocks, since
they can include invalid txs filled with garbage, but in that case the
application knows they they are invalid and can punish the proposer. But
since applications dont verify commit signatures directly (they trust
tendermint to do that), they won't be able to detect it.
This can impact incentivization logic in the application that depends on
the LastCommitInfo sent in BeginBlock, which includes which validators
signed. For instance, Gaia incentivizes proposers with a bonus for
including more than +2/3 of the signatures. But a proposer can now claim
that bonus just by including arbitrary data for the final -1/3 of
validators without actually waiting for their signatures. There may be
other tricks that can be played because of this.
In general, the full node should be a fully verifying machine. While
it's true that the light client can avoid verifying all signatures by
stopping after +2/3, the full node can not. Thus the light client and
full node should use distinct VerifyCommit functions if one is going to
stop after +2/3 or otherwise perform less validation (for instance light
clients can also skip verifying votes for nil while full nodes can not).
See a commit with a bad signature that verifies here: 56367fd. From what
I can tell, Tendermint will go on to think this commit is valid and
forward this data to the app, so the app will think the second validator
actually signed when it clearly did not.
Anton Kaliaev
5e52a6ec55