polkadot-secure-validator
Advanced tools
[](https://circleci.com/gh/w3f/polkadot-secure-validator)
This repo describes a potential setup for a Polkadot validator that aims to prevent some types of potential attacks, as described in the Polkadot Secure Validator approach. The Workflow section describes the Platform Layer and the Application Layer in more detail.
There are two ways of using this repository:
Platform & Application Layer
Configure credentials for infrastructure providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP and/or Packet, then execute the Terraform process to automatically deploy the required machines (Platform Layer) and setup the Application Layer.
See the Complete Guide for more.
Application Layer
Setup Debian-based machines yourself, which only need basic SSH access and configure those in an inventory. The Ansible scripts will setup the entire Application Layer.
See the Ansible Guide for more.
The secure validator setup is composed of one or more validators and a set of public nodes nodes connected to it. The validators are isolated from the internet and only have access to the Polkadot network through the public nodes.
The connection between the validator nodes and the public nodes is performed
defining a VPN to which all these nodes belong. The Polkadot instance running in
the validator nodes are configured to only listen on the VPN-attached interface,
and uses the public node's VPN address in the --reserved-nodes parameter. It is
also protected by a firewall that only allows connections on the VPN port.
This way, the only nodes allowed to connect to the validators are the public nodes through the VPN. Messages sent by other validators can still reach it through gossiping, and these validators can know the IP address of the secure validator because of this, but can't directly connect to it without being part of the VPN.
WARNING
If you use this tool to create and/or configure your validator setup or implement your setup based on this approach take into account that if you add public telemetry endpoints to your nodes (either the validator or the public nodes) then the IP address of the validator will be publicly available too, given that the contents of the network state RPC call are sent to telemetry.
Even though the secure validator in this setup only has the VPN port open and Wireguard has a reasonable approach to mitigate DoS attacks, we recommend to not send this information to endpoints publicly accessible.
The secure validator setup is structured in two layers, an underlying platform and the applications that run on top of it.
Both validator and public nodes are created in a similar way using the terraform modules located at terraform directory. We have created code for several providers but it is possible to add new ones, please reach out if you are interested in any provider currently not available.
Besides the actual machines the terraform modules create the minimum required networking infrastructure for adding firewall rules to protect the nodes.
This is done through the ansible playbook and roles located at ansible, the configuration applied depend on the type of node:
Common:
Software firewall setup, for the validator we only allow the VPN and SSH ports, for the public nodes VPN SSH and p2p ports.
VPN setup: for the VPN solution we are using WireGuard, at this stage we create the private and public keys on each node, making the public keys available to ansible.
VPN install: we install and configure WireGuard on each host using the public keys from the previous stage. The configuration for the validator looks like:
[Interface]
PrivateKey = <...>
ListenPort = 51820
SaveConfig = true
Address = 10.0.0.1/24
[Peer]
PublicKey = 8R7PTv1CdNLHRsDvrvE58Ac0Inc9vOLY2vFMWIFV/W4=
AllowedIPs = 10.0.0.2/32
Endpoint = 64.93.77.93:51820
[Peer]
PublicKey = ZZW6Wuk+YjJToeLHIUrp0HAqfNozgQfUMo2owC2Imzg=
AllowedIPs = 10.0.0.3/32
Endpoint = 50.81.184.50:51820
[Peer]
PublicKey = LZHKtuGCxz9iCoNNDmQzzNe9eF9aLXj/4yJRkFjCWzM=
AllowedIPs = 10.0.0.4/32
Endpoint = 45.243.244.130:51820
Polkadot setup: create a Polkadot user and group and download the binary.
Public nodes:
Start Polkadot service: the public nodes are started and we make the libp2p peer id of the node available to ansible. The generated systemd unit looks like:
[Unit]
Description=Polkadot Node
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/polkadot \
--name sv-public-0 \
--sentry
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Private (validator) nodes:
Start Polkadot service: the private (validator) node is started with the node's VPN address as part
of the listen multiaddr and the multiaddr of the public nodes (with the peer id
from the previous stage and the VPN addresses) as reserved-nodes. It looks like:
[Unit]
Description=Polkadot Node
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/polkadot \
--name sv-private \
--validator \
--listen-addr=/ip4/10.0.0.1/tcp/30333 \
--reserved-nodes /ip4/10.0.0.2/tcp/30333/p2p/QmNpQbu2nKfHQMySnCue3XC9mAjBfzi8DQ9KvNwUM8jZdx \
--reserved-nodes /ip4/10.0.0.3/tcp/30333/p2p/QmY81TLZKeNj4mGDAhFQE6RrHEJPidAkccgUTsJo7ifNFJ \
--reserved-nodes /ip4/10.0.0.4/tcp/30333/p2p/QmTwMDJDnPyHUHV2fZFcVbNpYzp6Fu7LP6VhhK3Ei13iXr
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
This setup partitions the network in 3 separate kind of nodes: secure validator,
its public node and the regular network nodes, haveing each group a different
vision and accessibility to the rest of the network. To verify this, we'll execute
the system_networkState RPC call on nodes of each partition:
curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" --data '{ "jsonrpc":"2.0", "method":"system_networkState", "params":[],"id":1 }' localhost:9933
It can only reach and be reached by its public nodes, from the
system_networkState RPC call:
{
[ ........ ]
"result": {
"connectedPeers": {
[ only validator's public nodes shown here]
"QmPjNcWNZjNrjVFzkNYR6jH7HLqyU7j9piczUyNoxce1fD": {
"enabled": true,
"endpoint": {
"dialing": "/ip4/10.0.0.2/tcp/30333"
},
"knownAddresses": [
"/ip6/::1/tcp/30333",
"/ip4/10.0.0.2/tcp/30333",
"/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/30333",
"/ip4/172.26.59.86/tcp/30333",
"/ip4/18.197.157.119/tcp/30333"
],
"latestPingTime": {
"nanos": 256512049,
"secs": 0
},
"open": true,
},
[ ........ ]
},
"notConnectedPeers": {
[ always known regular nodes: boot nodes, other validators, etc ]
"QmP3zYRhAxxw4fDf6Vq5agM8AZt1m2nKpPAEDmyEHPK5go": {
"knownAddresses": [
"/dns4/p2p.testnet-4.kusama.network/tcp/30100"
],
"latestPingTime": null,
"versionString": null
},
[ ........ ]
},
"peerset": {
[ all known nodes shown here, only reported connected to validator's public nodes ]
"QmPjNcWNZjNrjVFzkNYR6jH7HLqyU7j9piczUyNoxce1fD": {
"connected": true,
"reputation": 1114
},
"QmP3zYRhAxxw4fDf6Vq5agM8AZt1m2nKpPAEDmyEHPK5go": {
"connected": false,
"reputation": 0
},
[ ........ ]
"reserved_only": true
}
}
}
They can reach and be reached both by the validator and by the network regular nodes:
{
[ ........ ]
"result": {
"connectedPeers": {
[ secure validator, other secure validator's public nodes and regular nodes]
"QmZSocEssLWHYCY6mqR99DcSFEpMb95fVeMsScrY8jqBm8": {
"enabled": true,
"endpoint": {
"listening": {
"listen_addr": "/ip4/10.0.0.2/tcp/30333",
"send_back_addr": "/ip4/10.0.0.1/tcp/54932"
}
},
"knownAddresses": [
"/ip4/10.0.0.1/tcp/30333",
"/ip4/10.0.1.18/tcp/30333",
"/ip4/147.75.199.231/tcp/30333",
"/ip4/10.0.1.152/tcp/30333"
],
"latestPingTime": {
"nanos": 335876602,
"secs": 0
},
"open": true,
},
"QmP3zYRhAxxw4fDf6Vq5agM8AZt1m2nKpPAEDmyEHPK5go": {
"enabled": true,
"endpoint": {
"listening": {
"listen_addr": "/ip4/172.26.59.86/tcp/30333",
"send_back_addr": "/ip4/191.232.49.216/tcp/3008"
}
},
"knownAddresses": [
"/dns4/p2p.testnet-4.kusama.network/tcp/30100",
"/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/30100",
"/ip4/10.244.0.10/tcp/30100",
"/ip4/191.232.49.216/tcp/30100"
],
"latestPingTime": {
"nanos": 603313251,
"secs": 0
},
"open": true,
},
[ ........ ]
},
"notConnectedPeers": {
[ regular nodes ]
"QmW45D6YLfctkSnsjyoqcSxw9qoiXUmAFGn5ea99L6SC7X": {
"knownAddresses": [
"/ip4/10.8.2.14/tcp/30101",
"/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/30101",
"/ip4/34.80.190.48/tcp/30101"
],
"latestPingTime": {
"nanos": 571989635,
"secs": 0
},
},
[ ........ ]
},
"peerset": {
[ all known nodes reported as connected here ]
"QmP3zYRhAxxw4fDf6Vq5agM8AZt1m2nKpPAEDmyEHPK5go": {
"connected": true,
"reputation": 1277
},
"QmZSocEssLWHYCY6mqR99DcSFEpMb95fVeMsScrY8jqBm8": {
"connected": true,
"reputation": -571
},
[ ........ ]
"reserved_only": false
}
}
}
They can reach and be reached by the validator's public nodes and by other regular nodes, the don't have access to the validator.
{
[ ........ ]
"result": {
"connectedPeers": {
[ secure validator's public nodes and regular nodes ]
"QmPjNcWNZjNrjVFzkNYR6jH7HLqyU7j9piczUyNoxce1fD": {
"enabled": true,
"endpoint": {
"listening": {
"listen_addr": "/ip4/10.44.1.11/tcp/30101",
"send_back_addr": "/ip4/18.197.157.119/tcp/42962"
}
},
"knownAddresses": [
"/ip4/172.26.59.86/tcp/30333",
"/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/30333",
"/ip6/::1/tcp/30333",
"/ip4/18.197.157.119/tcp/30333",
"/ip4/10.0.0.2/tcp/30333",
"/ip4/10.0.1.18/tcp/30333"
],
"latestPingTime": {
"nanos": 108101687,
"secs": 0
},
"open": true,
},
"QmP3zYRhAxxw4fDf6Vq5agM8AZt1m2nKpPAEDmyEHPK5go": {
"enabled": true,
"endpoint": {
"listening": {
"listen_addr": "/ip4/10.44.1.11/tcp/30101",
"send_back_addr": "/ip4/191.232.49.216/tcp/3010"
}
},
"knownAddresses": [
"/dns4/p2p.testnet-4.kusama.network/tcp/30100",
"/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/30100",
"/ip4/191.232.49.216/tcp/30100",
"/ip4/10.244.0.10/tcp/30100"
],
"latestPingTime": {
"nanos": 717286051,
"secs": 0
},
"open": true,
"versionString": "parity-polkadot/v0.5.0-4e53ad1-x86_64-linux-gnu (unknown)"
},
[ ........ ]
},
"notConnectedPeers": {
[ secure validator ]
"QmZSocEssLWHYCY6mqR99DcSFEpMb95fVeMsScrY8jqBm8": {
"knownAddresses": [
"/ip4/10.0.0.1/tcp/30333",
"/ip4/10.0.1.18/tcp/30333",
"/ip4/10.0.1.152/tcp/30333",
"/ip4/147.75.199.231/tcp/30333"
],
"latestPingTime": {
"nanos": 375552762,
"secs": 0
},
}
[ ........ ]
},
"peerset": {
[ all known nodes shown here, reported connected to all, secure validator with 0 reputation ]
"QmP3zYRhAxxw4fDf6Vq5agM8AZt1m2nKpPAEDmyEHPK5go": {
"connected": true,
"reputation": 1115
},
"QmPjNcWNZjNrjVFzkNYR6jH7HLqyU7j9piczUyNoxce1fD": {
"connected": true,
"reputation": 3500
},
"QmZSocEssLWHYCY6mqR99DcSFEpMb95fVeMsScrY8jqBm8": {
"connected": true,
"reputation": 0
},
[ ........ ]
"reserved_only": false
}
}
}
FAQs
[](https://circleci.com/gh/w3f/polkadot-secure-validator)
The npm package polkadot-secure-validator receives a total of 2 weekly downloads. As such, polkadot-secure-validator popularity was classified as not popular.
We found that polkadot-secure-validator demonstrated a not healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released a year ago. It has 2 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
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