node: Add Transfer Verifier mechanism #4169
Open
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.
Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.
Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.
You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.
Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.
This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.
Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.
Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.
Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
Transfer Verifier
This PR is a joint effort between myself, @pleasew8t, and @mdulin2.
Overview
This PR introduces the Transfer Verifier, a mechanism to improve Token
Bridge security by validating transaction receipts that correspond to Publish
Message events emitted from the Core Bridge.
When the core bridge emits a Publish Message event, the Transfer Verifier does
the following:
(e.g. an Ethereum receipt transaction)
emitted by the Token Bridge contract
transfers into the token bridge
into the Token Bridge, the program emits an error to signal to the node that
there is a security incident.
This provides protection in the event that an attacker devises a way to emit
arbitrary publish message events from the core contract or else somehow tricks
the Token Bridge into making token transfer calls without any backing tokens.
While existing Integrity Checks (Governor and Accountant) would help mitigate
this attack, Transfer Verifier acts as another layer of protection.
What this PR contains
This PR contains two initial implementations for Ethereum and Sui.
Both implementations are bundled into a Transfer Verifier package. This package
is used by a new
transfer-verifier
binary that exists as a subcommand withinguardiand
. This binary can be configured to monitor the mainnet token bridge and corebridge contracts for this chain.
Testing
Both implementations contain a large number of unit tests. They can be invoked
as a normal part of testing the node via
make test
.The Ethereum implementation has integration tests built into the Tilt set-up:
invoked to monitor the Ethereum devnet
cast
(partof the Foundry toolset)
returns a success when it appears
In order to impersonate a call from the Token Bridge to the Core Bridge, the
--auto-impersonate
flag was added to theanvil
invocation in eth-devnet.Future Work
The Transfer Verifier package is used here as a standalone binary. Its
fundamental output are logs that can be monitored and manually acted upon.
The next iteration of this project will be to integrate the package directly in
the Ethereum and Sui watchers
Integration into the Ethereum watcher
Ethereum has an advantage over the Sui implementation due to the robust logging
and tooling present in the EVM and its ecosystem. We can validate the relevant
information for Transfer Verification in a highly robust way and detect
violations of its invariants with certainty.
As a result, we can use the logic in the Transfer Verifier to block
transactions at the level of the Ethereum watcher so that malicious message
publications will not be processed by the network.
Integration into the Sui watcher
The nature of Sui makes it relatively difficult to provide guarantees about the
state of the core bridge relative to the token bridge. The Sui implementation
cannot provide the same guarantees as the Ethereum implementation due to limits
inherent in the chain.
It is still possible to integrate this protection into the Sui watcher but it
would be better to delay messages for e.g. 24h in this case rather than reject
them outright.
Additional implementations for other chains
This is an abstract algorithm that can in theory be applied to any chain supported by the Token Bridge.
Designing a Solana implementation of this script would be a fruitful choice
given that it is one of the chains that makes the most use of the Token Bridge.