State of Development: Week of March 12th, 2018

Release 0.10.0 is out!

With much dedication and patience, this week we managed deliver our next release — 0.10.0. The release focuses on optimizing and improving the security of the peers synchronization protocol by reducing the amount of data exchanged between them and ensuring the synchronization is resilient to network failures.

But there is more. In addition to the work on æternity’s sync protocol, the new release:

Eases verification of the Coinbase transaction, by including the mining reward within it. This impacts both the consensus and the persisted DB;

Makes the lookup of blocks/headers by height faster by introducing an index in the DB. This impacts the persisted DB;

Fixes an attack vector, in which a malicious node can claim to be at height one million ahead with higher difficulty. Before this fix, a peer would have to read all one million headers and start building the chain before they are able to detect the node’s malicious behavior. If this attack is done repeatedly, it could completely deplete the node’s memory. The fix allows a peer to determine if the node is malicious and break all further communications with it.

In parallel, we are continuing our work on the VM and the Sophia smart contract language, we are continually making progress on implementing state channels that will make our smart contracts fly and harden the security of peer-to-peer communications by finalizing the integration of the Noise security framework.

Your support is always welcome and its best form is code and/or ideas. Show us what you got!