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Tick Verification

This design the criteria and validation of ticks in a slot. It also describes error handling and slashing conditions encompassing how the system handles transmissions that do not meet these requirements.

Slot structure

Each slot must contain an expected ticks_per_slot number of ticks. The last shred in a slot must contain only the entirety of the last tick, and nothing else. The leader must also mark this shred containing the last tick with the LAST_SHRED_IN_SLOT flag. Between ticks, there must be hashes_per_tick number of hashes.

Handling bad transmissions

Malicious transmissions T are handled in two ways:

  1. If a leader can generate some erroneous transmission T and also some alternate transmission T' for the same slot without violating any slashing rules for duplicate transmissions (for instance if T' is a subset of T), then the cluster must handle the possibility of both transmissions being live.

Thus this means we cannot mark the erroneous transmission T as dead because the cluster may have reached consensus on T'. These cases necessitate a slashing proof to punish this bad behavior.

  1. Otherwise, we can simply mark the slot as dead and not playable. A slashing proof may or may not be necessary depending on feasibility.

Blockstore receiving shreds

When blockstore receives a new shred s, there are two cases:

  1. s is marked as LAST_SHRED_IN_SLOT, then check if there exists a shred s' in blockstore for that slot where s'.index > s.index If so, together s and s' constitute a slashing proof.

  2. Blockstore has already received a shred s' marked as LAST_SHRED_IN_SLOT with index i. If s.index > i, then together s and s'constitute a slashing proof. In this case, blockstore will also not insert s.

  3. Duplicate shreds for the same index are ignored. Non-duplicate shreds for the same index are a slashable condition. Details for this case are covered in the Leader Duplicate Block Slashing section.

Replaying and validating ticks

  1. Replay stage replays entries from blockstore, keeping track of the number of ticks it has seen per slot, and verifying there are hashes_per_tick number of hashes between ticks. After the tick from this last shred has been played, replay stage then checks the total number of ticks.

Failure scenario 1: If ever there are two consecutive ticks between which the number of hashes is != hashes_per_tick, mark this slot as dead.

Failure scenario 2: If the number of ticks != ticks_per_slot, mark slot as dead.

Failure scenario 3: If the number of ticks reaches ticks_per_slot, but we still haven't seen the LAST_SHRED_IN_SLOT, mark this slot as dead.

  1. When ReplayStage reaches a shred marked as the last shred, it checks if this last shred is a tick.

Failure scenario: If the signed shred with the LAST_SHRED_IN_SLOT flag cannot be deserialized into a tick (either fails to deserialize or deserializes into an entry), mark this slot as dead.