2019-05-07 Meeting notes: hardening requirements

Resources

• Mercury release criteria

Questions

• What are the hardening requirements for components of the platform and the platform as a whole? OR How do we challenge duration, load, and stability?

• What are ideas recommendations for the hardening effort?

What will we do as part of the hardening effort?

• Generative testing

  • Consensus

    • @Pawel Szulc is taking lead

    • Generate random DAG. Run an oracle to find finalized block. Add more blocks to get to next finalization. Validate finalization change

  • Rholang

    • @Timm Schäuble is taking lead

    • Generate random AST. Validate correctness.

    • Run various property tests for the interpreter.

    • Greg’s suggestion

      • Open

        

      • This is a framework that could be used “quick check for Rholang”

      • Based on John Holland’s idea of genetic algorithms

• Consider running games described for Ceres Games

• Design and runs a game to take down the network

  • Malicious validators with a small amount of weight

  • Goal to increase the weight required

• Code audit

  • Cross-team internal code audit

  • External

• HackerOne engagement

• Hardening infrastructure

  • Geographic distribution of nodes using GCP options

  • Wide

    • How many networks can we afford to operate? (pubnet, devnet, Whiteblock)

      • Could we have multiple instances in Whiteblock?

    • Deep

      • How many tests can we run end-to-end in a 24-hour period?

• Fight regression

  • Use testnet better to run dev

• Mechanism for generate, store, and deploy contracts

  • TICKET tool to ask node what was deployed

  • Goal to ensure we’re using a wide variety of contracts in our tests

• A/B testing with devnet and pubnet

  • Mirror every deploy made to pubnet to devnet

• Performance

  • TICKET alerting for the perf harness

• Chaos monkey

  • Hardware instability

  • Random killing of node processes

  • Packet dropping

  • Do at both OS and GCP levels

Discussion about tests

• RCAT

  • Test against RCat

  • Runs against a GRPC port

  • Unit tests could be run against it

  • Integration tests available

• Tic tac toe on the network

  • Tic tac toe

    • https://github.com/dckc/RChain-API/blob/games/fun/ticTacToe.rho

    • Players (contracts)

    • Board (state)

• Generative tests (see above)

Things we need to improve testing

• Need a better tuplespace metric

  • @Dominik Zajkowski reports work in progress

• Confirm or add metrics for RNode

  • How long is the deploy queue for validators

Misc.

• Can we run 5-6k tests per week?

• We can accelerate by reusing the DAG as it gets longer

  • Ex run tests, pull DAG, add it to another test and keep building on it

• Discussion about a hard fork after mainnet launch

  • We expect there would be a hard fork(s)in the first 1-2 years.

Discussion about Mercury release criteria

• Mercury release criteria

Which contracts to stress the network?

• Recommendation to use wallet transfer

  • Vault demo script https://github.com/rchain/rchain/tree/dev/rholang/examples/vault_demo

  • Balance query

    • Currently there isn’t a way to get data off chain. Option is to scrape node log. Suggestion to scrape logs. Contract is in the examples file

• Recommendation to use RSong contracts in a black box testing scenario

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Discussion about grace period

• What else could we use other than specified grace period to understand when Casper is complete