## Issue Addressed
Recent discussions with other client devs about optimistic sync have revealed a conceptual issue with the optimisation implemented in #3738. In designing that feature I failed to consider that the execution node checks the `blockHash` of the execution payload before responding with `SYNCING`, and that omitting this check entirely results in a degradation of the full node's validation. A node omitting the `blockHash` checks could be tricked by a supermajority of validators into following an invalid chain, something which is ordinarily impossible.
## Proposed Changes
I've added verification of the `payload.block_hash` in Lighthouse. In case of failure we log a warning and fall back to verifying the payload with the execution client.
I've used our existing dependency on `ethers_core` for RLP support, and a new dependency on Parity's `triehash` crate for the Merkle patricia trie. Although the `triehash` crate is currently unmaintained it seems like our best option at the moment (it is also used by Reth, and requires vastly less boilerplate than Parity's generic `trie-root` library).
Block hash verification is pretty quick, about 500us per block on my machine (mainnet).
The optimistic finalized sync feature can be disabled using `--disable-optimistic-finalized-sync` which forces full verification with the EL.
## Additional Info
This PR also introduces a new dependency on our [`metastruct`](https://github.com/sigp/metastruct) library, which was perfectly suited to the RLP serialization method. There will likely be changes as `metastruct` grows, but I think this is a good way to start dogfooding it.
I took inspiration from some Parity and Reth code while writing this, and have preserved the relevant license headers on the files containing code that was copied and modified.
I've needed to do this work in order to do some episub testing.
This version of libp2p has not yet been released, so this is left as a draft for when we wish to update.
Co-authored-by: Diva M <divma@protonmail.com>
Our custom RPC implementation is lagging from the libp2p v50 version.
We are going to need to change a bunch of function names and would be nice to have consistent ordering of function names inside the handlers.
This is a precursor to the libp2p upgrade to minimize merge conflicts in function ordering.
