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## 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. |
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