Splitting witnesses into 2 parts

Execution Layer Research
1

TL;DR

This is a proposal to split witnesses into 2 complementary parts: data and proofs, allowing for stateless clients to process just the necessary data without the merkle proofs (and thus reducing network traffic) and without proving the stateRoot, while retaining a high degree of certainty for the data being processed thanks to a new witnessHash field in the block header (a hash of the hashes of the data and the merkle proofs) secured by the consensus layer, with the option to retrieve the proofs as well and fully validate the state transition.

The biggest motivation for this is the reduction of witness sizes, which are dominated by merkle proofs. An additional benefit might be faster stateless client execution and faster beam sync (a new-ish take on it) if the stateRoot check is postponed (compared to constantly re-merkelizing the state trie all the way up to the top after every block).

Detailed description

The data part of a witness

It should contain the absolute minimum for transaction execution:

  • the state trie nodes referenced by the transactions in the associated block
  • the code chunks (but without their merkle proofs), as envisioned in the current code-merkelization efforts
  • positional information (bitmaps) for the code chunks - which parts of the bytecode of a contract are present (for a 340-byte contract with 32-byte chunking that would be 11 bits - truly negligible)

Currently, (not in this proposal) witnesses contain the necessary trie nodes, the merkle multiproof, and some structural information (masks) required to position the nodes in the right places in the state trie in order for the stateRoot hash to actually match. If we decide to also add that structural information to the data part of this split witness proposal we could enable a new kind of beam sync - one which gradually reconstructs the state trie without merkelizing all the way up to the stateRoot every time (and thus requiring smaller witnesses), but merkelizing the branches that are already entirely available (more on this a bit further below). This structural information (the “masks”) is really small (compared to the hashes in the merkle multiproof), as can be seen in this graph (taken from this article) and it can be easily bundled in the data part instead of the proofs part.

The proofs part of a witness

It should contain everything else necessary to fully validate the stateRoot for the given block:

  • the merkle proofs for the state trie nodes
  • the merkle proofs for the code chunks within each contract
  • the merkle proofs for the state trie for all contracts used in the block (actually a subset of the first point here)

Witness construction and the witnessHash in the block headers

If we hash the data and the proofs parts we can then hash those 2 hashes and construct the witnessHash, which should go into the block header (which would require a protocol change). When distributing just the data part of the witness we would need to also ship the hash of the proofs part in order for clients to validate the witnessHash without requiring the proofs part as well.

This way, even though the stateRoot isn’t validated, we still rely on the PoW or PoS consensus for the validity of the witnessHash hash (because constructing bogus blocks would be costly to attackers).

A witnessHash has already been mentioned in articles such as this (in the context for witness indexing). Given that the average block size is 40Kb, the addition of 32 extra bytes for the witnessHash would lead to an increase of 0.08% of the main blockchain which is negligible.

Construction, encoding, and decoding

The current witness specification requires that witnesses are efficient (decoded, validated, and executed in a single pass with minimum dynamic memory allocation) and streamable (stream-as-you-encode - without intermediate dynamic buffers). I’m not familiar with merkle multiproofs, but it should be possible to achieve the same goals with 2 separate binary blobs, which ought to be created and consumed together and in parallel (lockstep), except for when just the data part is being used by a stateless client.

Size savings

The only addition of new data in this 2-part witness proposal is the bitmaps for the contract chunks, which as we saw will be just a few bytes for each contract - all other data is already present in the current witness spec. All the savings would come from separating the proofs. The best resource regarding the data/proofs ratio I’ve found is this article and especially this graph (if I’m reading it correctly…) from which I conclude that the ratio is something along the lines of 0.3 (~220 / (~250 + ~450)), so that means that the data part is about 24% of the witness size and thus we would be saving ~75%. Would appreciate any numbers regarding this.

Security

In fast sync, you basically trust all the state transitions until the point at which you joined and you trust the consensus layer and just how economically infeasible it would be for someone to have cheated before that. Not validating the stateRoot by using just the data part of witnesses is just an extreme continuation of that - by constantly pushing this trust boundary to the current head block (in contrast to fully validating the chain from some point onwards). Stateless clients that don’t validate the stateRoot are just a new point on the edge of the trust spectrum (how much assumptions are being made). In the case that a block producer cheats and changes the stateRoot to something which doesn’t match reality - all stateless clients who don’t use the proofs part will be oblivious to that.

However, in case of a broken block, the rest of the full nodes (and stateless clients who use the proofs part) won’t agree with it - they will simply not propagate the bad blocks, and witnesses and miners will refuse to build upon the invalid chain. In addition to that, stateless clients can at any point in time request the proofs part and validate if things are OK - the frequency of requesting/processing it can be a tunable parameter - let’s say once an hour (for 1 out of every 240 blocks).

Beam sync

If the structural information (masks) for the state trie nodes is included in the data part, then stateless clients can gradually build a local copy of the state trie. The difference with how beam sync currently works is that the stateRoot won’t be getting validated for quite some time - this will save on computation and networking, which should speed up the sync process, but at some point, the node should request a multiproof for all gaps (branches) of the state trie which prevent full merkelization all the way up to the top, after which it could switch to fast sync for the remaining state.

Advantages

  • This solves the need for witness indexing and has already been mentioned here (look for witnessHash).
  • It also solves the problem of incentivizing full nodes to produce witnesses.
  • Blocks should be propagated only when their witness comes along - a good constraint.
  • The witnessHash for a block can get validated before executing the block ==> less room for a DoS attack with invalid witnesses.
  • The less impact witnesses have on networking, the less need there is for gas scheduling and moving from a hexary to a binary trie for the state (which is a complex engineering challenge).

Disadvantages

  • Harder to implement (especially the part around beam sync and not fully merkelizing up to the top), more complexity around which parts of witnesses are propagated through the network (and when).
  • A little less trustworthy - not “true” block validation.

Other notes

  • I’m not familiar with Kate commitments, if there’s consensus for using them and if the idea of moving to a binary state trie has been abandoned - perhaps this entire proposal is obsolete…?
1 Like
2

I think that you are describing “segregated witness”, which was originally from Bitcoin, but it has been brought up in Eth1x discussions. Also relevant are access lists, which are gaining support, and are a step towards segregated witness.

BTW some things you mention have changed since the Eth1x pivot to ReGenesis. For example, under ReGenesis, people want (i) transaction witnesses (which seem to solve the witness gas accounting problem), (ii) a KV-witness encoding (which is more convenient for ReGenesis), and (iii) no code merkleization (which is awkward and less critical under ReGenesis). This is just the feeling I get from following Eth1x discussions.

If one thinks more abstractly, then they may want to decouple witnesses from blocks entirely. One hopeful idea is to use pre-consensus, an avalanche-like consensus to agree on which witnesses are important before blocks are mined. Another discussion was about having a tendermint-like multi-stage consensus with delayed execution to allow witnesses to propagate.

Kate commitments are not currently being championed for Eth1x. Hashing is less controversial and more practical for now. We hope that cryptographic accumulators will mature in a few years. Or maybe the accumulator problem will disappear.

3

My understanding is that SegWit is about removing transaction signatures from Bitcoin blocks (in order to free up space) and storing them to an extension of each block, which only SegWit-enabled nodes in the network validate (and only those nodes can include and validate SegWit transactions), while the rest of the nodes in the network just accept the blocks (without the witness extension) and don’t validate the SegWit transactions. This way more transactions can be fit in a single block without having to hard-fork the chain.

The proposal here is not about fitting more transactions in blocks and avoiding a hard fork but reducing the state (witnesses for the relevant parts of the state trie, necessary for executing the current block) sent over the wire, which stateless clients need to execute the state transitions - data which is orders of magnitude bigger than the blocks themselves. I’ve been looking into how Ethereum’s state works for just 1 week (and SegWit for just a few hours) and it’s quite likely that I’m misunderstanding something and the 2 are not as orthogonal as I might think - or perhaps there is confusion in the use of the term witness in the 2 cases. I’ll have to look into ReGenesis too.

4

Hey Viktor, I saw this is your first post here. I’m not very active myself, but still…welcome!

I can see your point that “merkleizing” the witness itself can bring flexibility in light client design. Now about the client which doesn’t verify the merkle hashes and only uses the witness data section (let’s call it an anti-merkle client): As you mention yourself this client suffers from worse security specially at the tip of the chain as it relies on consensus for security and consensus is hazy at the tip.

Aside from that I wanted to raise a potential edge case. And that is a crafted block that fully verifying client can execute correctly but an anti-merkle client fails to execute (correctly). One example I could think of involves exclusion proofs. Depending on the witness format details (e.g. in turboproofs), it might be impossible for an anti-merkle client to distinguish between a leaf not present in the witness and a leaf not present in the state trie. Of course in that case it could request the merkle hashes to resolve this.

Btw since this client design needs to download and verify the header chain it might benefit from chain history proofs like other light clients to reduce network bandwidth further.

1 Like