This week we witnessed the first slashing on the Cosmos Hub. A misconfiguration of one of the validators led them to double-sign a block, which the Cosmos Hub punishes with a 5% slashing of staked Atom deposits:
While in this case, the slashing was neither the consequence of an attack on the network nor the result of a compromised validator key, it demonstrates that slashing is real and that validators should carefully design their infrastructure to mitigate the risk of losing their own and their delegators’ funds.
We have already published a high-level overview of our architecture earlier, as well as carried out an audit to test if our architecture is at risk to be compromised by outside attackers. Today, we are following the practices of some of our fellow validators (notably Iqlusion, Certus One, and Figment) and release a comprehensive (19-page) overview of our complete validation estate:
We hope that this document will prove helpful to those eager to learn more about building and running validator infrastructure. Our architecture was designed following common security best practices without compromising the ability to scale and onboard new networks and upgrade node software swiftly, even as a distributed organization. In case you are left with questions or suggestions after reading this document, don’t hesitate to contact us on Twitter or through our Telegram community channel!
PS: Some of you that have checked out the document may have wondered why there’s no blurry pictures of our server racks; sadly, our vendor doesn’t allow mobile phones on the datafloor, so have a picture of Roosevelt, our platform engineer’s cat instead:
Originally published at https://blog.chorus.one on July 4, 2019.
