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Ledger Replication

At full capacity on a 1gbps network solana will generate 4 petabytes of data per year. To prevent the network from centralizing around validators that have to store the full data set this protocol proposes a way for mining nodes to provide storage capacity for pieces of the data.

The basic idea to Proof of Replication is encrypting a dataset with a public symmetric key using CBC encryption, then hash the encrypted dataset. The main problem with the naive approach is that a dishonest storage node can stream the encryption and delete the data as it's hashed. The simple solution is to periodically regenerate the hash based on a signed PoH value. This ensures that all the data is present during the generation of the proof and it also requires validators to have the entirety of the encrypted data present for verification of every proof of every identity. So the space required to validate is number_of_proofs * data_size

Optimization with PoH

Our improvement on this approach is to randomly sample the encrypted segments faster than it takes to encrypt, and record the hash of those samples into the PoH ledger. Thus the segments stay in the exact same order for every PoRep and verification can stream the data and verify all the proofs in a single batch. This way we can verify multiple proofs concurrently, each one on its own CUDA core. The total space required for verification is 1_ledger_segment + 2_cbc_blocks * number_of_identities with core count equal to number_of_identities. We use a 64-byte chacha CBC block size.

Network

Validators for PoRep are the same validators that are verifying transactions. If an archiver can prove that a validator verified a fake PoRep, then the validator will not receive a reward for that storage epoch.

Archivers are specialized light clients. They download a part of the ledger a.k.a Segment and store it, and provide PoReps of storing the ledger. For each verified PoRep archivers earn a reward of sol from the mining pool.

Constraints

We have the following constraints:

Verification requires generating the CBC blocks. That requires space of 2

blocks per identity, and 1 CUDA core per identity for the same dataset. So as

many identities at once should be batched with as many proofs for those

identities verified concurrently for the same dataset.
Validators will randomly sample the set of storage proofs to the set that

they can handle, and only the creators of those chosen proofs will be

rewarded. The validator can run a benchmark whenever its hardware configuration

changes to determine what rate it can validate storage proofs.

Validation and Replication Protocol

Constants

SLOTS_PER_SEGMENT: Number of slots in a segment of ledger data. The

unit of storage for an archiver.
NUM_KEY_ROTATION_SEGMENTS: Number of segments after which archivers

regenerate their encryption keys and select a new dataset to store.
NUM_STORAGE_PROOFS: Number of storage proofs required for a storage proof

claim to be successfully rewarded.
RATIO_OF_FAKE_PROOFS: Ratio of fake proofs to real proofs that a storage

mining proof claim has to contain to be valid for a reward.
NUM_STORAGE_SAMPLES: Number of samples required for a storage mining

proof.
NUM_CHACHA_ROUNDS: Number of encryption rounds performed to generate

encrypted state.
NUM_SLOTS_PER_TURN: Number of slots that define a single storage epoch or

a "turn" of the PoRep game.

Validator behavior

Validators join the network and begin looking for archiver accounts at each

storage epoch/turn boundary.
Every turn, Validators sign the PoH value at the boundary and use that signature

to randomly pick proofs to verify from each storage account found in the turn boundary.

This signed value is also submitted to the validator's storage account and will be used by

archivers at a later stage to cross-verify.
Every NUM_SLOTS_PER_TURN slots the validator advertises the PoH value. This is value

is also served to Archivers via RPC interfaces.
For a given turn N, all validations get locked out until turn N+3 a gap of 2 turn/epoch.

At which point all validations during that turn are available for reward collection.
Any incorrect validations will be marked during the turn in between.

Archiver behavior

Since an archiver is somewhat of a light client and not downloading all the

ledger data, they have to rely on other validators and archivers for information.

Any given validator may or may not be malicious and give incorrect information, although

there are not any obvious attack vectors that this could accomplish besides having the

archiver do extra wasted work. For many of the operations there are a number of options

depending on how paranoid an archiver is:
- a archiver can ask a validator
- b archiver can ask multiple validators
- c archiver can ask other archivers
- d archiver can subscribe to the full transaction stream and generate
  
  the information itself assuming the slot is recent enough
- e archiver can subscribe to an abbreviated transaction stream to
  
  generate the information itself assuming the slot is recent enough
An archiver obtains the PoH hash corresponding to the last turn with its slot.
The archiver signs the PoH hash with its keypair. That signature is the

seed used to pick the segment to replicate and also the encryption key. The

archiver mods the signature with the slot to get which segment to

replicate.
The archiver retrives the ledger by asking peer validators and

archivers. See 6.5.
The archiver then encrypts that segment with the key with chacha algorithm

in CBC mode with NUM_CHACHA_ROUNDS of encryption.
The archiver initializes a chacha rng with the a signed recent PoH value as

the seed.
The archiver generates NUM_STORAGE_SAMPLES samples in the range of the

entry size and samples the encrypted segment with sha256 for 32-bytes at each

offset value. Sampling the state should be faster than generating the encrypted

segment.
The archiver sends a PoRep proof transaction which contains its sha state

at the end of the sampling operation, its seed and the samples it used to the

current leader and it is put onto the ledger.
During a given turn the archiver should submit many proofs for the same segment

and based on the RATIO_OF_FAKE_PROOFS some of those proofs must be fake.
As the PoRep game enters the next turn, the archiver must submit a

transaction with the mask of which proofs were fake during the last turn. This

transaction will define the rewards for both archivers and validators.
Finally for a turn N, as the PoRep game enters turn N + 3, archiver's proofs for

turn N will be counted towards their rewards.

The PoRep Game

The Proof of Replication game has 4 primary stages. For each "turn" multiple PoRep games can be in progress but each in a different stage.

The 4 stages of the PoRep Game are as follows:

Proof submission stage
- Archivers: submit as many proofs as possible during this stage
- Validators: No-op
Proof verification stage
- Archivers: No-op
- Validators: Select archivers and verify their proofs from the previous turn
Proof challenge stage
- Archivers: Submit the proof mask with justifications for fake proofs submitted 2 turns ago
- Validators: No-op
Reward collection stage
- Archivers: Collect rewards for 3 turns ago
- Validators: Collect rewards for 3 turns ago

For each turn of the PoRep game, both Validators and Archivers evaluate each stage. The stages are run as separate transactions on the storage program.

Finding who has a given block of ledger

Validators monitor the turns in the PoRep game and look at the rooted bank

at turn boundaries for any proofs.
Validators maintain a map of ledger segments and corresponding archiver public keys.

The map is updated when a Validator processes an archiver's proofs for a segment.

The validator provides an RPC interface to access the this map. Using this API, clients

can map a segment to an archiver's network address correlating it via cluster\_info table.

The clients can then send repair requests to the archiver to retrieve segments.
Validators would need to invalidate this list every N turns.

Sybil attacks

For any random seed, we force everyone to use a signature that is derived from a PoH hash at the turn boundary. Everyone uses the same count, so the same PoH hash is signed by every participant. The signatures are then each cryptographically tied to the keypair, which prevents a leader from grinding on the resulting value for more than 1 identity.

Since there are many more client identities then encryption identities, we need to split the reward for multiple clients, and prevent Sybil attacks from generating many clients to acquire the same block of data. To remain BFT we want to avoid a single human entity from storing all the replications of a single chunk of the ledger.

Our solution to this is to force the clients to continue using the same identity. If the first round is used to acquire the same block for many client identities, the second round for the same client identities will force a redistribution of the signatures, and therefore PoRep identities and blocks. Thus to get a reward for archivers need to store the first block for free and the network can reward long lived client identities more than new ones.

Validator attacks

If a validator approves fake proofs, archiver can easily out them by

showing the initial state for the hash.
If a validator marks real proofs as fake, no on-chain computation can be done

to distinguish who is correct. Rewards would have to rely on the results from

multiple validators to catch bad actors and archivers from being denied rewards.
Validator stealing mining proof results for itself. The proofs are derived

from a signature from an archiver, since the validator does not know the

private key used to generate the encryption key, it cannot be the generator of

the proof.

Reward incentives

Fake proofs are easy to generate but difficult to verify. For this reason, PoRep proof transactions generated by archivers may require a higher fee than a normal transaction to represent the computational cost required by validators.

Some percentage of fake proofs are also necessary to receive a reward from storage mining.

Notes

We can reduce the costs of verification of PoRep by using PoH, and actually

make it feasible to verify a large number of proofs for a global dataset.
We can eliminate grinding by forcing everyone to sign the same PoH hash and

use the signatures as the seed
The game between validators and archivers is over random blocks and random

encryption identities and random data samples. The goal of randomization is

to prevent colluding groups from having overlap on data or validation.
Archiver clients fish for lazy validators by submitting fake proofs that

they can prove are fake.
To defend against Sybil client identities that try to store the same block we

force the clients to store for multiple rounds before receiving a reward.
Validators should also get rewarded for validating submitted storage proofs

as incentive for storing the ledger. They can only validate proofs if they

are storing that slice of the ledger.

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