## Proposed Changes
Update all dependencies to new semver-compatible releases with `cargo update`. Importantly this patches a Tokio vuln: https://rustsec.org/advisories/RUSTSEC-2023-0001. I don't think we were affected by the vuln because it only applies to named pipes on Windows, but it's still good hygiene to patch.
## Issue Addressed
NA
## Proposed Changes
Myself and others (#3678) have observed that when running with lots of validators (e.g., 1000s) the cardinality is too much for Prometheus. I've seen Prometheus instances just grind to a halt when we turn the validator monitor on for our testnet validators (we have 10,000s of Goerli validators). Additionally, the debug log volume can get very high with one log per validator, per attestation.
To address this, the `bn --validator-monitor-individual-tracking-threshold <INTEGER>` flag has been added to *disable* per-validator (i.e., non-aggregated) metrics/logging once the validator monitor exceeds the threshold of validators. The default value is `64`, which is a finger-to-the-wind value. I don't actually know the value at which Prometheus starts to become overwhelmed, but I've seen it work with ~64 validators and I've seen it *not* work with 1000s of validators. A default of `64` seems like it will result in a breaking change to users who are running millions of dollars worth of validators whilst resulting in a no-op for low-validator-count users. I'm open to changing this number, though.
Additionally, this PR starts collecting aggregated Prometheus metrics (e.g., total count of head hits across all validators), so that high-validator-count validators still have some interesting metrics. We already had logging for aggregated values, so nothing has been added there.
I've opted to make this a breaking change since it can be rather damaging to your Prometheus instance to accidentally enable the validator monitor with large numbers of validators. I've crashed a Prometheus instance myself and had a report from another user who's done the same thing.
## Additional Info
NA
## Breaking Changes Note
A new label has been added to the validator monitor Prometheus metrics: `total`. This label tracks the aggregated metrics of all validators in the validator monitor (as opposed to each validator being tracking individually using its pubkey as the label).
Additionally, a new flag has been added to the Beacon Node: `--validator-monitor-individual-tracking-threshold`. The default value is `64`, which means that when the validator monitor is tracking more than 64 validators then it will stop tracking per-validator metrics and only track the `all_validators` metric. It will also stop logging per-validator logs and only emit aggregated logs (the exception being that exit and slashing logs are always emitted).
These changes were introduced in #3728 to address issues with untenable Prometheus cardinality and log volume when using the validator monitor with high validator counts (e.g., 1000s of validators). Users with less than 65 validators will see no change in behavior (apart from the added `all_validators` metric). Users with more than 65 validators who wish to maintain the previous behavior can set something like `--validator-monitor-individual-tracking-threshold 999999`.
## 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.
