Preventing intersubjective faults in ICS

This is a discussion about preventing misbehavior by validators on consumer chains, for offenses other than double signing. These are defined as “intersubjective faults” by the EIGEN paper , but it is a topic we have been studying in the context of Interchain Security for years. The approach we are advocating for here is: • First, to define precisely what constitutes various types of intersubjective faults. • Second, have a social contract in place that validators committing these faults should be punished by a hard fork of ATOM that takes away their stake, in the worst case scenario. • Third, build a governance proposal that slashes and tombstones them without the need for a hard fork, unless governance is compromised. With this approach we will have a system which provides protection against intersubjective faults comparable to that provided by the EIGEN token, but which is much smoother since it will not require a fork for every single dispute (and will never require a fork at all unless governance is seriously compromised). But first, some background: Slashing for equivocation The only type of serious validator misbehavior that is currently slashed for on the…

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I already saw a discussion somewhere on GitHub issues on a proposal type to slash a validator. (UPD: Found it: Make a slash governance proposal · Issue #10917 · cosmos/cosmos-sdk · GitHub) Can these two be merged? E.g. a proposal suggesting to “slash a validator by 1% but leave them in the active set” or “slash a validator by 5% and kick them out permanently”.

Also, some of the things, like oracle attacks/liveness attacks can be also slashed for on chain, like AFAIK on Kujira if your price-feeder reports the data that differs severely from what others are reporting (or doesn’t report at all), your validator is jailed, so it makes sense to add these as a separate slashing/jailing reasons.

Introduction: We are thrilled to see this concept being introduced to the public. These solutions have been under development in the Cosmos ecosystem for quite some time, long before the introduction of EigenLayer’s intersubjective slashing. While some may view Eigen as an innovator in this area, it’s important to remember that Cosmos has had this capability since its inception. Thanks to the SDK’s governance module, which can execute actions based on vote tallies, Cosmos has always had the ability to slash participants based on subjective criteria. However, the Eigen paper presents interesting mathematical approaches to resolving this problem with efficiency, which could be valuable to draw from. We look forward to participating in this debate and the next step of the CHIP process, which will be the “signaling phase,” expected to follow this early community feedback gathering. Feedback & Suggestions: Regarding feedback, at Govmos, we recommend drawing inspiration from the Eigen math presented in their whitepaper. Specifically, we suggest leveraging the newly accepted permissionless CosmWasm integration on the Hub to create logic similar to Eigen’s. This would involve…

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