Protocol Plugins

This document describes the protocol plugins implemented in Mavkit.

Protocol-specific shell plugins, simply called protocol plugins, implement extra APIs needed by the shell in order to interact with the economic protocol, beyond the one provided by the protocol environment. This code is not strictly speaking part of the protocol code base, so this is not subject to on-chain governance (see voting procedure), but it is still protocol-dependent, which means that it may vary with different protocols. For instance, the plugin code for protocol Alpha is located in file src/proto_001_PtAtLas/lib_plugin/plugin.ml. Thus, a specific version is included in the Mavkit node for each protocol version (recall that a new release of Mavkit is usually delivered for each new protocol proposal, see Release System)

In contrast to the Mavkit code, plugins are protocol-specific and as such, know how to read the content of an operation.

So what kind of features may a protocol plugin provide? For instance, protocol plugins do not define the context, or restrict the validity of operations. In turn protocol plugins may, for example:

  • perform protocol-dependent computations that require data not available in the amendable part of the protocol like accessing the current time to reason on timestamps (see Consensus filter);

  • preserve the opacity/abstraction barrier of the protocol’s internal data by performing computations on internal data without revealing it: e.g., there are some RPCs that can introspect the protocol-dependent content for certain operations;

  • implement some common operations that are customized for each protocol (e.g., Prevalidator filters).

Prevalidator filters

Prevalidator filters, which are detailed in the rest of this page, enable the node to discard some operations (that cannot be included in the next block) faster and restrict the operations it propagates to the network. Filters are implemented as a node plugin and a specific filter is delivered with each protocol version. When the chain switches to a new protocol, the node installs its corresponding filters, in lieu of the filters of the previous protocol. Notice that prevalidator filters are not mandatory, their absence does not break the Mavryk blockchain protocol.

The interface of the prevalidator plugin is described at the mempool plugin API .

The different kinds of prevalidator filters are described below.

Fees filter

A very affordable technique for attackers is based on flooding the network with, valid but useless, zero-fees operations. This is why the prevalidator filter currently restricts operations based on their associated fees, to reject “too cheap” or “zero-fees” operations. This can be configured via the minimal_fees, minimal_nanomav_per_gas_unit and minimal_nanomav_per_byte (see filter RPCs) parameters of the filter configuration of your node.

This filtering strategy is implemented in the prefilter (see The Prevalidator).

Consensus filter

For technical reasons, the economic protocol cannot reject consensus operations based on their timestamp. Consequently, many consensus operations are declared as valid by the economic protocol while being timestamped too early or too late. The plugin filter aims to narrow down the number of consensus operations declared as valid based on several heuristics. In particular, the filter can use the current timestamp while the protocol cannot.

This filter classifies a consensus operation according to the current block proposal as follows:

  • Outdated if it concerns a previous head at a previous level,

  • Branch_refused if it concerns a previous head at the same level but in the previous round,

  • Branch_delayed if it concerns a round in the future.

This filtering strategy is implemented in the prefilter (see The Prevalidator).

Prechecking of manager operations

The aim of the precheck filter is to avoid fully executing manager operations before deciding whether to gossip them to the network.

The detailed description of this feature is given in Prechecking of manager operations. For operations other than manager operations, the precheck filter is a no-op, which entails that these operations need to be fully executed to decide their propagation (see The Prevalidator).

One manager operation per manager per block

The mempool filters, prefilter, precheck and postfilter also ensure that, since the last head update (the last valid block which increased the chain’s fitness), only one operation per manager is propagated. All other received operations originating from the same manager will be classified as Branch_delayed and will not be propagated.

Alternatively, a user can inject an operation with the same manager and the same counter, but with a higher fee to replace an already existing operation in the prevalidator. Only one of the two operations will be eventually included in a block. To be able to replace the first operation, the fee and the “fee/gas limit” ratio of the second one is supposed to be higher than the first’s by a factor (currently fixed to 5%). In case of successful replacement, the old operation is re-classified as Outdated.

Concretely, a user can replace a successfully prechecked manager operation in the mempool, with the help of mavkit-client, using two methods :

  • manually provide a higher fee to bump the “fee/gas limit” ratio by at least 5% for the new operation,

  • via option --replace: In this case, mavkit-client will automatically compute the minimal amount of fee for the second operation to be able to replace the one in the mempool.

Operations prioritization and ordering

In addition to quick detection of operations that have no chance to be prechecked or applied in the current context, the mempool’s prefilter provides a priority for each successfully filtered operation. Concretely, the priority is either High, Medium or Low in the current implementation, depending on the validation pass.Some extra information (like the fees, or the gas/fees ratio of manager operations) are also provided along the priorities to enable fine-grained operations ordering. This extra information is similar to the one used by the baker’s operations selection mechanism, that decides which operations will be included in the next block.

Bounding the number of propagated manager operations

The plugin implements a lightweight classification function, called precheck, that doesn’t check the total gas consumption. So with this modication and those of Mavkit 12.0, the prevalidator, would propagate any succesfully prevalidated operation. In order to protect nodes from potential DDoS, a new mechanism has been added in the plugin to bound the number of successfully prechecked operations. This mechanism works as follows:

  • Advertise the best N successfully prechecked manager operations (where “best” is w.r.t. the priority described above, and N is a tunable parameter) found in the set of pending operations to the network after a new head is chosen and operations’ classification reset. All other pending operations that should have been prechecked are instead classified as Branch_delayed;

  • Once the limit N is reached, the node may still receive additional manager operations (via the network or RPC injection) with higher priorities than those previously prechecked/advertised. Any such operation that is successfully prechecked is advertised, and, in turn, the previously prechecked/advertised manager operation with the lowest priority (not necessarily from the same source) is reclassified as Branch_delayed.

The default value of the parameter N is chosen such that a node will always propagate enough manager operations to allow the next baker to produce a filled block (if there are enough operations in the network). Its value is currently fixed to 5000. Indeed, the total size occupied by manager operations in a block is currently bounded by 512 KiB, and unset deposits limit seems to be the smallest manager operation, with 126 Bytes, so there are at most 512 * 1024 / 126 = 4161 manager operations per block.

Filters RPCs

Filters are tunable by several parameters, whose values can be retrieved and changed by users via the following RPC calls, respectively:

  • rpc get /chains/<chain>/mempool/filter

  • rpc post /chains/<chain>/mempool/filter

The following parameters can be thus inspected and modified:

  • minimal_fees: type int, default 100

  • minimal_nanomav_per_gas_unit: type int, default 100

  • minimal_nanomav_per_byte: type int, default 1000

  • allow_script_failure: type bool, default true

  • clock_drift : type Period.t option, default None

  • max_prechecked_manager_operations : type int, default 5000

  • replace_by_fee_factor : type rational, default 21/20 (ie. 1.05%)

For example, each command below modifies the provided parameter and resets all the others to their default values:

mavkit-client rpc post /chains/main/mempool/filter with '{ "minimal_fees": "42" }'
mavkit-client rpc post /chains/main/mempool/filter with '{ "replace_by_fee_factor": [ "23", "20" ] }'
mavkit-client rpc post /chains/main/mempool/filter with '{ "max_prechecked_manager_operations": 7500 }'

Changing filters default configuration

Changing filters configuration may not have the expected outcome. Because the configuration is only changed on your node, and not on all the gossip network nodes, this will only impact how operations of your nodes are propagated. For example, assuming there are three nodes A, B and C such that A is connected to B and B is connected to C. Assume that A modifies its filter configuration so that minimal_fees is now 0. Then A may propagate an operation with 0 fee to B. However, because B has the default filter configuration, this operation will not be propagated to C (so C may never see it).