Q1 2022 Update on STORE Chain

Rate Limiting & DDoS Mitigation

Demonstrated that Store Miner nodes can withstand DDoS attacks that are several orders above their capacity and they can still function normally. We will be using this infrastructure to protect each Miner in the Store network. Our DDoS Mitigation test is conclusive enough that the protection works even when the “attack” sent 83 times to it’s normal capacity and 33 times its breaking point.

p2p communication

Evaluated different options for p2p communication & built a secure p2p communication channel for Miners using NATS. BlockfinBFT will be built on top of this channel.

BLS signature minimization

In order to minimize the signature overhead for every block in the store network, we worked on BLS threshold signatures. It allows “m of N” signature constructs, where m < N. In our case N = 3f + 1 where N is the total number of miners and f is the Byzantine failures the network can tolerate and completed the POC, which can be used in the BlockFinBFT implementation.

Multi-master Postgres testing

Experimented different ways to implement the multi-master postgres replication without impacting the performance and demonstrated that multi-master replication is possible with replication delays in milliseconds when pumped with millions of transactions.

Stored procedures

Currently, we are working on POC to prove that most of the database heavy lifting work can be done using stored procedures, also using it as a validation layer, to make it harder for attackers to execute malicious commands.