Securing Crypto-Economic Systems

Transcript

all right so my name is Andre Joseph I work for uh this protocol Ian layer I work at igen Labs the creator of IG igen the protocol uh I am a security researcher there uh so what is Igan layer igen layer is a protocol built on ethereum that introduced the concept of reaking so we have since gone past just reaking and we what we do currently is Shar security so you can provide security and bootstrap networks

uh built on this shared security we call it programmable trust and I will dive into what that is one of the core problems Igan is solving is bootstrapping decentralized infrastructure so if you a new L1 you know that it's really hard for you to get stakers operators and uh get them all to like run your software right so this this problem has been solved by igen layer so before we dive into reaking we should understand what is staking ethereum staking right so a very high

level of what ethereum taking is it looks something like this you deposit 32 e into a deposit contract it's spending for a while and you run your validator it verifies the blocks and then your e becomes active on the beacon chain if you follow all the rules uh you get rewards for it if you break any rules you get slash for it so what is reaking reaking allows stakers who have already staked on the beacon chain to use that same e that is available on the beacon chain to secure additional

networks so how can we do that right we want you to set the withdrawal credential of your validator to a Smart contract and we call we have the smart contract called the igen pod which so as a validator you would set your validator withdrawal credential to the smart contract so we are able to slash for any actions that you may have carried out while you were while you were validating any of these additional networks so for example if you are a bridge and you made a commitment to do a

certain task but you didn't then when you withdraw from the beon chain your e would end up on the smart contract and then we can slash for the that particular amount and then you you will be able to withdraw the rest so that is how reaking works there is it is also Capital efficient right when you bootstrap net new networks you are splitting up Capital uh so so if you want to like run your own L1 you have to have a certain amount of Economic Security backing it but when you talk about the concept of shared security uh with aenl you you are

sharing all that Economic Security among your avss I will dive into what those are but you can see that it is a much better system pooled security versus monolithic so these are the four components of an igon layer Marketplace we have the consumers which could be the rollup users uh we have the stakers who deposit funds to us so that's really what economic security is and we have the AVS developers so something like AER Network you could call that call that an AVS and operators who runs these AVS so

something like coinbase cloud so uh we have experienced uh good tvl growth and these are some of the operators with different capabilities that are currently on igl so if you have like a PR Network you can pick the operators with gpus if you are running a te Network you can pick the operators with those cap capabilities and yeah this category just keeps growing right this is just a screen cap of like what we have have right now and we have about 18 of those on Main net 40 on test net and 100 plus in development right

now so a very high level overview of what the protocol is before we dive into the exciting bits which is slashing which is on a pre-release on devet right now and we are very excited to share that architecture with you all so 30,000 foot overview stakers deposit their tokens onto a smart contract stakers delegate that Capital to operators who would run this software the offchain software so just like how rocket pool or Lio would work you delegate your Capital to an operator and the operator runs the

validator for you so just like that the Staker delegates the capital to to an operator and operator runs the software now there is a slashing contract so what is a slashing contract right imagine uh you are a bridge and a a validator a bridge validator has to follow certain rules so as a slashing contract enforces those rules so you can think of it as how eth how ethereum works right ethereum has certain rules like do not double sign a block that is a that is a rule that is enforced by the ethereum clients if you

do you get slashed so just like that you can write smart contracts that is a slashing smart contract which verifies if you have committed a fault or not if if these Faults Are cryptographically verifiable then it is easy to like write a smart contract and you know you can use like fraud proofs you can use CK proofs like you can use many mechanisms like even a mercel proof to prove something so it's completely up to the AVS how they design it but we obviously want the slashing contract to be really secure so please get all your audits when you write something like

that okay so we talk about programmable trust right so what is programmable trust the amount sted we call it economic trust the geographic diversity we call it the decentralized trust and a lot of ethereum validators also opt into running these abss so they can make commitments like when I when I get to propose my next block I will include this specific transaction and you can verify that on chain so that is the ethereum trust so what can you do with programmable trust right you can build apps with commitments so what are apps with

commitments the OG Bitcoin there is a commitment only 21 million Bitcoins ever right and what is a commitment from Unis swap find the fair market Price uh and what is what is it from a the lenders assures the lenders that borrowers were never under collateralized so we have unisoft Bitcoin a poly Market all of that today and these are the technologies that under underpin the services but can we create an Uber competitor that makes a commitment like I will never take more than 5% take rate can we do that today

with what we have this is really where apps with commitments can make a difference so we have this analogy we call ourselves the verifiable commitment cloud and you can see why we are doing it so at the Staker operator and developer level you can make certain commitments like we will not censor we will not double sign and the these These are at at that ABS level and then you can have app level commitments depending on the app that you're trying to build right uh so if you're unisoft I I make an app level commitment to make sure I

always have Fair ordering and uh finality and uh so you can see how it applies for a and poly market right now to have apps with commitments you need a carrot and a stick the carrot is the rewards the stick is slashing so we have rewards on mainnet already so I I'll will not be going into that but what we don't have right now is slashing so I'm really really excited to say that we have slashing pre-release on devet today so if you scan the QR code you can find the GitHub repository which is a

pre-release things are going to change but if you're excited this is pre- audit uh things are going to change but we are excited to put it out there uh play with it and slashing is a two-part release so the first one uh that we have on the devet is where the malicious operators delegate at stake is slashed and burned so this the stake is burnt and the V2 The malous Operators delegate stake is slashed and sent to the harmed parties so you can think of it as insurance so

we have a term here called Stak Shure that is the white paper that we put out which talks about the insurance model on igen lir so if you're interested just Google that and you'll find a nice white paper out there so some key Concepts uh with slashing uh we introduced this term called operator sets so operator sets is a grouping of operators who have been delegated e so when I say e it could be like any token because we accept any arbitrary ERC 20s now so when when when you see eth it could be like anything else so who have been delegated these tokens by the

stakers and are assigned certain task by ABS so what are tasks right so imagine you are a PR Network and you you want to generate a ZK proof so you can assume that it is a task and this is a task that an ABS have to respond to so operators run these avss and the task is to generate a CK proof for this data that that is provided to you so tasks are dis dispersed to these operator sets and we have this concept called total stake the total amount of e delegated to an operator is the total

stake of that operator and an operator sets total stake is the sum of all the operators total Stak so uh as a Staker I might choose to like delegate to like a solo operator uh like solo Staker right but you may choose to like delegate it to like the operator that is run by coinbase or something so the total stake that is delegated to an operator right that is really what we are talking about here and unique stake this is what is very different from our previous slashing model uh operators allocate a percentage of their e or any token that an operator

set is permitted to slash so a this unit of e can only be slashed by a single operator set at any given time so you can be assured that multiple parties do not have claim to the same e so you have like unique rights to slash a certain amount of e so that is a guarantee that the protocol gives you with this new slashing model and we call that unique state so this is what uh operator sets look like uh you can see uh a Staker has 300 e and they have delegated 100 e each to

like three operators and they all run ABS one and you can see that AVS 1 has multiple operator sets and operator one only runs only has the operator set one operator operator two and operator 3 is opted into both the operator set one and operator set two and you can see that c some tasks are only allocated to operator set one and you can see certain tasks are only allocated to operator set two so B and C task B and C is allocated only to like operator set two so this is a nice way

of abss can have multiple operator sets with varying levels of total stake and unique stake so it is very versatile and you can use it depending on the task at hand so total stake right so this is an operator one with the 100 each Stak uh so this is an ex example operator allocation of unique stake the you should an operator can allocate less than than 100% of their stake you can see that the operator allocates like 50% of their stake to AVS 4 uh on operator

set five and abs3 gets 30% of their e which is operator set four and operator set three gets 5% and operator set one gets zero so what that means is that an operator can run multiple avss and out out of all the stake that is delegated to an operator they can choose to split the percent allocated to the operator sets and that stake is uniquely attributable to that operator set and as you can see here

uh this is how unique stake Works uh a unique stake is the amount of stti that is uniquely slash by an operator set so this is a combination of the previous slide and the slide after you can see that abss have multiple operator sets and there is unique stake allocated to operator sets and you can use a combination of total stake and unique stake because they have different properties right total stake

is just like the sum like you can see that the total stake is a total amount of each delegated to an operator and the unique stake is is the amount of stake that you have unique right to slash so when when you if you wanted to for your AVS you can choose a rule like I need 50% uh consensus on both Total stake and unique stake so these things have good properties so total stake raises the amount that is required to

attack your AVS and unique stake also Burns attack backers funds because that stake is uniquely attributable and slash by an operator set so by making um a decision to like maybe have a 50% consensus on total stake and unique stake you raise the bar for attack and you increase the damage to the attacker so you can read a lot more about the slashing model uh in this blog post so you can just scan the QR code if you are

interested so this is our new and improved slashing model I know someone was trying to scan the QR code sorry about that got it okay so this is the new and improved slashing model what is what is good here right the greater control over slashing risk and you have guaranteed slash stake there is no more a need for a common veto committee and you have permissionless onboarding of abss uh and what is the risk and mitigations right

so we have cryptoeconomic attacks avss with not enough security budget imagine your security provider paing for an upgrade what happens to the security of an ABS right so these are interesting things to talk about we have this concept of an allocation delay within the protocol this allows stakers to react before the stake becomes slash in a new abs and this protect against malicious operators we also have a deallocation delay which prevents withdrawing stake immediately after malicious actions so the stake remains slash during this

window and uh it it is is one of the most important things the cost of crime should be bigger right so if you do not uh if you do not have cryptoeconomic safety you will get attacked and we will have insurance in the next upgrade so it's fun to think about all the things that can go wrong when you when you have heard of insurance fraud in the real world right so this protocol becomes a lot more complex and interesting once we have insurance and uh we cannot forget about web 2 security so we have docs if you

are an ABS developer if you are an operator uh please follow these best practices and uh that's pretty much it I have a lot more slides but we are out of time uh I'll be over there so if you have any questions I'll be taking those and uh thank you so much [Applause]