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ADR 047: Handling evidence from light client

Changelog

18-02-2020: Initial draft
24-02-2020: Second version
13-04-2020: Add PotentialAmnesiaEvidence and a few remarks
31-07-2020: Remove PhantomValidatorEvidence
14-08-2020: Introduce light traces (listed now as an alternative approach)
20-08-2020: Light client produces evidence when detected instead of passing to full node
16-09-2020: Post-implementation revision
15-03-2020: Ammends for the case of a forward lunatic attack

Glossary of Terms

a LightBlock is the unit of data that a light client receives, verifies and stores. It is composed of a validator set, commit and header all at the same height.
a Trace is seen as an array of light blocks across a range of heights that were created as a result of skipping verification.
a Provider is a full node that a light client is connected to and serves the light client signed headers and validator sets.
VerifySkipping (sometimes known as bisection or verify non-adjacent) is a method the light client uses to verify a target header from a trusted header. The process involves verifying intermediate headers in between the two by making sure that 1/3 of the validators that signed the trusted header also signed the untrusted one.
Light Bifurcation Point: If the light client was to run VerifySkipping with two providers (i.e. a primary and a witness), the bifurcation point is the height that the headers from each of these providers are different yet valid. This signals that one of the providers may be trying to fool the light client.

Context

The bisection method of header verification used by the light client exposes itself to a potential attack if any block within the light clients trusted period has a malicious group of validators with power that exceeds the light clients trust level (default is 1/3). To improve light client (and overall network) security, the light client has a detector component that compares the verified header provided by the primary against witness headers. This ADR outlines the process of mitigating attacks on the light client by using witness nodes to cross reference with.

Alternative Approaches

A previously discussed approach to handling evidence was to pass all the data that the light client had witnessed when it had observed diverging headers for the full node to process.This was known as a light trace and had the following structure:

type ConflictingHeadersTrace struct {
  Headers []*types.SignedHeader
}

This approach has the advantage of not requiring as much processing on the light client side in the event that an attack happens. Although, this is not a significant difference as the light client would in any case have to validate all the headers from both witness and primary. Using traces would consume a large amount of bandwidth and adds a DDOS vector to the full node.

Decision

The light client will be divided into two components: a Verifier (either sequential or skipping) and a Detector (see Informal's Detector) . The detector will take the trace of headers from the primary and check it against all witnesses. For a witness with a diverging header, the detector will first verify the header by bisecting through all the heights defined by the trace that the primary provided. If valid, the light client will trawl through both traces and find the point of bifurcation where it can proceed to extract any evidence (as is discussed in detail later).

Upon successfully detecting the evidence, the light client will send it to both primary and witness before halting. It will not send evidence to other peers nor continue to verify the primary's header against any other header.

Detailed Design

The verification process of the light client will start from a trusted header and use a bisectional algorithm to verify up to a header at a given height. This becomes the verified header (does not mean that it is trusted yet). All headers that were verified in between are cached and known as intermediary headers and the entire array is sometimes referred to as a trace.

The light client's detector then takes all the headers and runs the detect function.

func (c *Client) detectDivergence(primaryTrace []*types.LightBlock, now time.Time) error

The function takes the last header it received, the target header and compares it against all the witnesses it has through the following function:

func (c *Client) compareNewHeaderWithWitness(errc chan error, h *types.SignedHeader,
	witness provider.Provider, witnessIndex int)

The err channel is used to send back all the outcomes so that they can be processed in parallel. Invalid headers result in dropping the witness, lack of response or not having the headers is ignored just as headers that have the same hash. Headers, however, of a different hash then trigger the detection process between the primary and that particular witness.

This begins with verification of the witness's header via skipping verification which is run in tande with locating the Light Bifurcation Point

This is done with:

func (c *Client) examineConflictingHeaderAgainstTrace(
	trace []*types.LightBlock,
	targetBlock *types.LightBlock,
	source provider.Provider, 
	now time.Time,
	) ([]*types.LightBlock, *types.LightBlock, error)

which performs the following

Checking that the trusted header is the same. Currently, they should not theoretically be different because witnesses cannot be added and removed after the client is initialized. But we do this any way as a sanity check. If this fails we have to drop the witness.
Querying and verifying the witness's headers using bisection at the same heights of all the intermediary headers of the primary (In the above example this is A, B, C, D, F, H). If bisection fails or the witness stops responding then we can call the witness faulty and drop it.
We eventually reach a verified header by the witness which is not the same as the intermediary header (In the above example this is E). This is the point of bifurcation (This could also be the last header).
There is a unique case where the trace that is being examined against has blocks that have a greater height than the targetBlock. This can occur as part of a forward lunatic attack where the primary has provided a light block that has a height greater than the head of the chain (see Appendix B). In this case, the light client will verify the sources blocks up to the targetBlock and return the block in the trace that is directly after the targetBlock in height as the ConflictingBlock

This function then returns the trace of blocks from the witness node between the common header and the divergent header of the primary as it is likely, as seen in the example to the right, that multiple headers where required in order to verify the divergent one. This trace will be used later (as is also described later in this document).

Now, that an attack has been detected, the light client must form evidence to prove it. There are three types of attacks that either the primary or witness could have done to try fool the light client into verifying the wrong header: Lunatic, Equivocation and Amnesia. As the consequence is the same and the data required to prove it is also very similar, we bundle these attack styles together in a single evidence:

type LightClientAttackEvidence struct {
	ConflictingBlock *LightBlock
	CommonHeight     int64
}

The light client takes the stance of first suspecting the primary. Given the bifurcation point found above, it takes the two divergent headers and compares whether the one from the primary is valid with respect to the one from the witness. This is done by calling isInvalidHeader() which looks to see if any one of the deterministically derived header fields differ from one another. This could be one of ValidatorsHash, NextValidatorsHash, ConsensusHash, AppHash, and LastResultsHash. In this case we know it's a Lunatic attack and to help the witness verify it we send the height of the common header which is 1 in the example above or C in the example above that. If all these hashes are the same then we can infer that it is either Equivocation or Amnesia. In this case we send the height of the diverged headers because we know that the validator sets are the same, hence the malicious nodes are still bonded at that height. In the example above, this is height 10 and the example above that it is the height at E.

The light client now has the evidence and broadcasts it to the witness.

However, it could have been that the header the light client used from the witness against the primary was forged, so before halting the light client swaps the process and thus suspects the witness and uses the primary to create evidence. It calls examineConflictingHeaderAgainstTrace this time using the witness trace found earlier. If the primary was malicious it is likely that it will not respond but if it is innocent then the light client will produce the same evidence but this time the conflicting block will come from the witness node instead of the primary. The evidence is then formed and sent to the primary node.

This then ends the process and the verify function that was called at the start returns the error to the user.

For a detailed overview of how each of these three attacks can be conducted please refer to the fork accountability spec.

Full Node Verification

When a full node receives evidence from the light client it will need to verify it for itself before gossiping it to peers and trying to commit it on chain. This process is outlined in ADR-059.

Status

Implemented.

Consequences

Positive

Light client has increased security against Lunatic, Equivocation and Amnesia attacks.
Do not need intermediate data structures to encapsulate the malicious behavior
Generalized evidence makes the code simpler

Negative

Breaking change on the light client from versions 0.33.8 and below. Previous versions will still send ConflictingHeadersEvidence but it won't be recognized by the full node. Light clients will however still refuse the header and shut down.
Amnesia attacks although detected, will not be able to be punished as it is not clear from the current information which nodes behaved maliciously.
Evidence module must handle both individual and grouped evidence.

Neutral

References

Appendix A

PhantomValidatorEvidence was used to capture when a validator that was still staked (i.e. within the bonded period) but was not in the current validator set had voted for a block.

In later discussions it was argued that although possible to keep phantom validator evidence, any case a phantom validator that could have the capacity to be involved in fooling a light client would have to be aided by 1/3+ lunatic validators.

It would also be very unlikely that the new validators injected by the lunatic attack would be validators that currently still have something staked.

Not only this but there was a large degree of extra computation required in storing all the currently staked validators that could possibly fall into the group of being a phantom validator. Given this, it was removed.

Appendix B

A unique flavor of lunatic attack is a forward lunatic attack. This is where a malicious node provides a header with a height greater than the height of the blockchain. Thus there are no witnesses capable of rebutting the malicious header. Such an attack will also require an accomplice, i.e. at least one other witness to also return the same forged header. Although such attacks can be any arbitrary height ahead, they must still remain within the clock drift of the light clients real time. Therefore, to detect such an attack, a light client will wait for a time

2 * MAX_CLOCK_DRIFT + LAG

for a witness to provide the latest block it has. Given the time constraints, if the witness is operating at the head of the blockchain, it will have a header with an earlier height but a later timestamp. This can be used to prove that the primary has submitted a lunatic header which violates monotonically increasing time.

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