Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

ADR 004: IBC Whitelisting #696

Closed
wants to merge 6 commits into from
Closed

ADR 004: IBC Whitelisting #696

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
6 commits
Select commit Hold shift + click to select a range
77934d8
feat: add initial vesion of ADR for whitelisting chains
rahulghangas Sep 9, 2022
70b7f6e
chore: remove markdown lint
rahulghangas Sep 15, 2022
ffabfbd
chore: typo
rahulghangas Sep 15, 2022
b407e4b
chore: typo
rahulghangas Sep 15, 2022
35694cc
chore: only use allowlist
rahulghangas Sep 25, 2022
e3b6219
chore: rename ADR-004-ibc whitelist to ADR-004-ibc-allowlist
rahulghangas Sep 25, 2022
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
27 changes: 27 additions & 0 deletions docs/architecture/ADR-004-IBC-allowlist.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
# ADR 004: IBC Allowlist

## Terminology

All terminology is defined in [ICS 024](https://github.com/cosmos/ibc/tree/main/spec/core/ics-024-host-requirements) and some references are from corresponding implementation of [ICS 002](https://github.com/cosmos/ibc/tree/main/spec/core/ics-002-client-semantics) in [ibc-go](https://github.com/cosmos/ibc-go/blob/da1b7e0aaf4b7d466b1a7d1ed4f5d81149ff1d5b/modules/core/02-client)

## Changelog

- 2022-03-03: Initial Commit

## Context

While enabling IBC, we want to connect, and allow messages from selected chains. However, we don't want the ability for an arbitrary entity to create an IBC connection with a zone. This is so that we can keep the state machine as minimal and focused as possible.
Copy link
Member

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

I think we first need to fully understand the overhead in the state machine of IBC and its pricing.


ICS specification indicates that is possible by providing a custom `validateClientIdentifier`, but no such functionality exists currently.

Secondly, the ICS specification dictates that `createClient` takes in an `Identifier`. A potential solution could be to create a store for allowed `Identifiers` at genesis, and reject creation of clients for invalid identifiers. However, this is not true for the current state of the implementation. Rather, client ID is generated from an incremental counter `NextClientSequence` and the client type.

## Proposal

Fork IBC, and create a store of whitelisted public keys. Only `createClient` txns that are signed by private keys corresponding to whitelisted/stored public keys are deemed valid, and the rest are invalidated. Specific keys will only be required for client creation, and rest of IBC will work as is.

## Alternative approaches

1. Simplest solution is fork to IBC, and add a small change to disallow creation/registration of new clients. Then we can create clients for the chains that we want to allow at genesis, and effectively create a whitelist. However, adding new clients or removing clients is not feasible under this.

2. Add a middleware to revert packets from non-whitelisted chains. This still adds state bloat since clients and corresponding connections are allowed to be established, but adds economic incentive in terms of lost gas from the malicious user/actor
Copy link
Member

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Another approach that @zmanian mentioned a while ago, is to allow only transfers with Celestia tokens as denomination.