lighthouse/testing/web3signer_tests/tls/README.md
Paul Hauner c5c7476518 Web3Signer support for VC (#2522)
[EIP-3030]: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-3030
[Web3Signer]: https://consensys.github.io/web3signer/web3signer-eth2.html

## Issue Addressed

Resolves #2498

## Proposed Changes

Allows the VC to call out to a [Web3Signer] remote signer to obtain signatures.


## Additional Info

### Making Signing Functions `async`

To allow remote signing, I needed to make all the signing functions `async`. This caused a bit of noise where I had to convert iterators into `for` loops.

In `duties_service.rs` there was a particularly tricky case where we couldn't hold a write-lock across an `await`, so I had to first take a read-lock, then grab a write-lock.

### Move Signing from Core Executor

Whilst implementing this feature, I noticed that we signing was happening on the core tokio executor. I suspect this was causing the executor to temporarily lock and occasionally trigger some HTTP timeouts (and potentially SQL pool timeouts, but I can't verify this). Since moving all signing into blocking tokio tasks, I noticed a distinct drop in the "atttestations_http_get" metric on a Prater node:

![http_get_times](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/6660660/132143737-82fd3836-2e7e-445b-a143-cb347783baad.png)

I think this graph indicates that freeing the core executor allows the VC to operate more smoothly.

### Refactor TaskExecutor

I noticed that the `TaskExecutor::spawn_blocking_handle` function would fail to spawn tasks if it were unable to obtain handles to some metrics (this can happen if the same metric is defined twice). It seemed that a more sensible approach would be to keep spawning tasks, but without metrics. To that end, I refactored the function so that it would still function without metrics. There are no other changes made.

## TODO

- [x] Restructure to support multiple signing methods.
- [x] Add calls to remote signer from VC.
- [x] Documentation
- [x] Test all endpoints
- [x] Test HTTPS certificate
- [x] Allow adding remote signer validators via the API
- [x] Add Altair support via [21.8.1-rc1](https://github.com/ConsenSys/web3signer/releases/tag/21.8.1-rc1)
- [x] Create issue to start using latest version of web3signer. (See #2570)

## Notes

- ~~Web3Signer doesn't yet support the Altair fork for Prater. See https://github.com/ConsenSys/web3signer/issues/423.~~
- ~~There is not yet a release of Web3Signer which supports Altair blocks. See https://github.com/ConsenSys/web3signer/issues/391.~~
2021-09-16 03:26:33 +00:00

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## TLS Testing Files
The files in this directory are used for testing TLS with web3signer. We store them in this
repository since the are not sensitive and it's simpler than regenerating them for each test.
The files were generated using the `./generate.sh` script.