Feature Request

Summary

As of v0.38, CometBFT introduces VoteExtensions (VE) as part of ABCI2.0. The content of VE is protected by signatures. A man-in-the-middle attack is now possible, between the validator who submitted each VE and the application. For example, a node can perform a MITM attack: while gossiping the pre-commit message to its peers it can stripping out or replace a VE.

To prevent such an attack, Comet handles the verification of extensions signature.

This issue captures the need to quantify or benchmark the impact of this additional verification step has on the overall performance of the system.

Problem Definition

Why do we need this work?
Because of application concerns that the additional signature verification incurs a heavy performance hit.

What problems may be addressed by introducing this work? Quantify with data the impact, and provide a ground to further reason about optimization that might be necessary to alleviate the performance impact.

Proposal

Beside signature verification, additionally assess the performance impact of different VE sizes (in bytes).

Dependencies

• requires QA of v0.38.0 v0.38 release plan #33