Lighthouse includes a slasher for identifying slashable offences comitted by other validators and including proof of those offences in blocks.
Running a slasher is a good way to contribute to the health of the network, and doing so can earn extra income for your validators. However it is currently only recommended for expert users because of the immaturity of the slasher UX and the extra resources required.
- Quad-core CPU
- 16 GB RAM
- 256 GB solid state storage (in addition to space for the beacon node DB)
⚠️ If you are running natively on Windows: LMDB will pre-allocate the entire 256 GB for the slasher database
The slasher runs inside the same process as the beacon node, when enabled via the --slasher flag:
lighthouse bn --slasher --debug-level debug
The slasher hooks into Lighthouse's block and attestation processing, and pushes messages into an in-memory queue for regular processing. It will increase the CPU usage of the beacon node because it verifies the signatures of otherwise invalid messages. When a slasher batch update runs, the messages are filtered for relevancy, and all relevant messages are checked for slashings and written to the slasher database.
You should run with debug logs, so that you can see the slasher's internal machinations, and provide logs to the devs should you encounter any bugs.
The slasher has several configuration options that control its functioning.
- Flag:
--slasher-dir PATH - Argument: path to directory
By default the slasher stores data in the slasher_db directory inside the beacon node's datadir,
e.g. ~/.lighthouse/{network}/beacon/slasher_db. You can use this flag to change that storage
directory.
- Flag:
--slasher-history-length EPOCHS - Argument: number of epochs
- Default: 4096 epochs
The slasher stores data for the history-length most recent epochs. By default the history length
is set high in order to catch all validator misbehaviour since the last weak subjectivity
checkpoint. If you would like to reduce the resource requirements (particularly disk space), set the
history length to a lower value, although a lower history length may prevent your slasher from
finding some slashings.
Note: See the --slasher-max-db-size section below to ensure that your disk space savings are
applied. The history length must be a multiple of the chunk size (default 16), and cannot be
changed after initialization.
- Flag:
--slasher-max-db-size GIGABYTES - Argument: maximum size of the database in gigabytes
- Default: 256 GB
The slasher uses LMDB as its backing store, and LMDB will consume up to the maximum amount of disk space allocated to it. By default the limit is set to accomodate the default history length and around 150K validators but you can set it lower if running with a reduced history length. The space required scales approximately linearly in validator count and history length, i.e. if you halve either you can halve the space required.
If you want a better estimate you can use this formula:
360 * V * N + (16 * V * N)/(C * K) + 15000 * N
where
Vis the validator countNis the history lengthCis the chunk sizeKis the validator chunk size
- Flag:
--slasher-update-period SECONDS - Argument: number of seconds
- Default: 12 seconds
Set the length of the time interval between each slasher batch update. You can check if your slasher is keeping up with its update period by looking for a log message like this:
DEBG Completed slasher update num_blocks: 1, num_attestations: 279, time_taken: 1821ms, epoch: 20889, service: slasher
If the time_taken is substantially longer than the update period then it indicates your machine is
struggling under the load, and you should consider increasing the update period or lowering the
resource requirements by tweaking the history length.
The update period should almost always be set to a multiple of the slot duration (12 seconds), or in rare cases a divisor (e.g. 4 seconds).
- Flag:
--slasher-slot-offset SECONDS - Argument: number of seconds (decimal allowed)
- Default: 10.5 seconds
Set the offset from the start of the slot at which slasher processing should run. The default value of 10.5 seconds is chosen so that de-duplication can be maximally effective. The slasher will de-duplicate attestations from the same batch by storing only the attestations necessary to cover all seen validators. In other words, it will store aggregated attestations rather than unaggregated attestations if given the opportunity.
Aggregated attestations are published 8 seconds into the slot, so the default allows 2.5 seconds for them to arrive, and 1.5 seconds for them to be processed before a potential block proposal at the start of the next slot. If the batch processing time on your machine is significantly longer than 1.5 seconds then you may want to lengthen the update period to 24 seconds, or decrease the slot offset to a value in the range 8.5-10.5s (lower values may result in more data being stored).
The slasher will run every update-period seconds after the first slot_start + slot-offset, which
means the slot-offset will be ineffective if the update-period is not a multiple (or divisor) of
the slot duration.
- Flags:
--slasher-chunk-size EPOCHS,--slasher-validator-chunk-size NUM_VALIDATORS - Arguments: number of ecochs, number of validators
- Defaults: 16, 256
Adjusting these parameter should only be done in conjunction with reading in detail about how the slasher works, and/or reading the source code.
If you would like to run a lightweight slasher that just checks blocks and attestations within the last day or so, you can use this combination of arguments:
lighthouse bn --slasher --slasher-history-length 256 --slasher-max-db-size 16 --debug-level debug
The slasher code is still quite new, so we may update the schema of the slasher database in a backwards-incompatible way which will require re-initialization.