solana/rfcs/0010-drones.md

Drone 1.0: A Signing Service

The goal of this RFC is to define a microservice called a drone, which acts as custodian of a user's private key. In its simplest form, it can be used to create airdrop transactions, a token transfer from the drone's account to a client's account.

Background

At the time of this writing, Solana contains an undocumented microservice called a drone. A client sends that drone a request for tokens and it then interacts with the Solana cluster directly to put the airdrop transaction on the ledger. Once confirmed, the drone returns its signature so that a client may also confirm the transaction.

The intent of the current design was that it be used by clients wanting to test-drive the Solana testnet. We did not intend for it to be used in mainnet, but recently we found variations of it are generally useful and so offer an updated design. Specifically, we have found that program owners may want to publish a drone such that potential program users may instantiate their programs without first owning any tokens. The program owner can use the existing drone to enable these users, but the approach is unsatisfying for a number of reasons:

1. Once the client has tokens to instantiate the program, the client may choose to simply keep them.
2. Instantiating a program requires two transaction fees - one for the airdrop and one to instantiate the program.
3. The drone uses its own resources to interact with the Solana cluster directly. This artificially limits the number of users it can serve and opens the drone to DoS attacks.

Signing Service

To solve the problems described above, the drone shall be reduced to a simple signing service. It shall listen for requests to sign transaction data. Once received, the drone should validate the request however it see fit. To implement the existing drone, for example, it may only accept transaction data with a SystemProgram::Move instruction transferring only up to a certain amount of tokens. If the drone accepts the transaction, it shall return an Ok(Signature) where Signature is a signature of the transaction data using the drone's private key. If it rejects the transaction data, it should return a DroneError describing why.

Examples

Granting access to an on-chain game

Creator of on-chain game tic-tac-toe hosts a drone that responds to airdrop requests containing an InitGame instruction. The drone signs the transaction data in the request and returns it, thereby authorizing its account to pay the transaction fee and as well as seeding the game's account with enough tokens to play it. The user then creates a transaction for its transaction data and the drones signature and submits it to the Solana cluster. Each time the user interacts with the game, the game pays the user enough tokens to pay the next transaction fee to advance the game. At that point, the user may choose to keep the tokens instead of advancing the game. If the creator wants to defend against that case, they could require the user to return to the drone to sign each instruction.

Worldwide airdrop of a new token

Creator of a new on-chain token (ERC-20 interface), may wish to do a worldwide airdrop to distribute its tokens to millions of users over just a few seconds. That drone cannot spend resources interacting with the Solana cluster. Instead, the drone should only verify the client is unique and human, and then return the signature. It may also want to listen to the Solana cluster for recent entry IDs to support client retries and to ensure the airdrop is targeting the desired cluster.

Attack vectors

Invalid last_id

The drone may prefer its airdrops only target a particular Solana cluster. To do that, it listens to the cluster for new entry IDs and ensure any requests reference a recent one.

Note: to listen for new entry IDs assumes the drone is either a fullnode or a light client. At the time of this writing, light clients have not been implemented and no Solana RFC describes them. This document assumes one of the following approaches be taken:

1. Define and implement a light client
2. Embed a fullnode
3. Query the jsonrpc API for the latest last id at a rate slightly faster than ticks are produced.

Double spends

A client may request multiple airdrops before the first has been submitted to the ledger. The client may do this maliciously or simply because it thinks the first request was dropped. The drone should not simply query the cluster to ensure the client has not already received an airdrop. Instead, it should use last_id to ensure the previous request is expired before signing another. Note that the Solana cluster will reject any transaction with a last_id beyond a certain age.

Denial of Service

If the transaction data size is smaller than the size of the returned signature (or descriptive error), a single client can flood the network. Considering that a simple Move operation requires two public keys (each 32 bytes) and a fee field, and that the returned signature is 64 bytes (and a byte to indicate Ok), consideration for this attack may not be required.

In the current design, the drone accepts TCP connections. This allows clients to DoS the service by simply opening lots of idle connections. Switching to UDP may be preferred. The transaction data will be smaller than a UDP packet since the transaction sent to the Solana cluster is already pinned to using UDP.