Ethereum [ETH] 2.0 client: Lighthouse project update released

Ethereum [ETH] 2.0 client: Lighthouse project update released

Recently, the developer team at Sigma Prime also known as SigP took to Twitter to announce an update on the recently launched open source Ethereum 2.0 client called ‘Lighthouse’. The team discussed the progress in the project and laid out the roadmap for future work.

In the official blog post, the team stated that the post covers the progress in the Lighthouse project carried out in the past two weeks. The team has successfully implemented the pre-processing of the Block. Lighthouse update 1 includes a Boneh–Lynn–Shacham [BLS] aggregate signature. However, the team stated that the BLS signatures are still unsafe.

A simpleSerialize [SSZ] has been implemented. A draft specification of the SSZ produced by SigP has been merged into the Ethereum 2.o specification repository.

Furthermore, they explained the block pre-processing implementation. SigP stated that it has been the most significant achievement implementing and benchmarking it.

The block pre-processing involves the process of accepting a serialized block from an untrusted source and “deeming” it valid. According to the team, the pre-processing stage is required to reduce the impact of malicious blocks on the system. The processing will be quick and inexpensive.

They further explained that the pre-processing stage involves many steps like validating the attestations, processing the attestations concurrently, de-serialization of records before validation to fail in cases of “bad attestations”. They added:

“A single invalid attestation invalidates the entire block so we avoid de-serializing them all up-front.”

The team also stated that they have performed pre-processing benchmarks. With the implementation of the BLS aggregate signatures, the team was able to use real signature verification and provide the pre-processing benchmarks.

According to the team, there has been some confusion in the Ethereum community regarding the exact BLS aggregation scheme used in the Ethereum 2.0 specification. SigP stated:

“Ethereum 2.0 uses the ‘old’ scheme described in BGLS03. The new scheme mitigates the “rouge-key attack” and allows signatures across distinct messages but is slower. Eth 2.0 protects against the rouge-key attack by requiring a bls_proof_of_possession on validator registration and naturally requires all signed messages to be identical (non-distinct).”

They added that the old scheme was faster and they did not require the features of the ‘new’ scheme.

Over the coming weeks, the team stated that they will be working on fuzzing framework, libp2p daemon, state transition logic. They will also be working on an implementation of the Friendly Finality Gadget [FFG] fork choice rule.

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