[ANN] Tendermint KMS v0.6: multitenancy, concurrent YubiHSM admin, better logging

Tendermint KMS v0.6.0-rc0 is out. Update: the final release is out ! We are presently running it in production here at @iqlusion on both Cosmos Hub and Terra. Expect a final release some time next week, however in the interim if you are feeling brave we’d love to get feedback about the upgrade before the final release. This release includes a number of improvements, bugfixes, and new features. Here are some quick highlights: • Better logging : the previous release did not provide very useful logging in many respects - it was tricky to get it to log correctly at all, and even when it did, useful information was only visible at the “debug”/verbose loglevel, and even then the information you might care about was buried in debugging details. This release should provide log information you care about at the default loglevel. • Better CLI usage/help : the previous release was arcane and did not provide good usage / help, especially compared to something like `gaiad`. The new CLI help should be much improved over the previous version. • Multitenancy : this release supports concurrent operation on multiple Tendermint networks and concurrent connections to validators on…

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Really great work, 0.0.5 been super stable for now.

We’ve released Tendermint KMS v0.6.0-rc1, which is the last RC we intend to publish before a final release, which will likely happen early next week.

You can view a list of the changes since v0.6.0-rc0 earlier this month, and also the full list of changes since v0.5.0.

Notable changes since the last release are a number of bugfixes and improvements for users of the softsign backend, including a new tmkms softsign command which now contains the keygen subcommand as well as a new import subcommand for converting key formats. Additionally, tmkms.toml now contains a key_format option for the softsign section, allowing it to use either a raw binary key, a key in the priv_validator.json format, or a key in the Base64 format which is now the default for tmkms keygen.

At iqlusion we have just updated our production KMS cluster to this RC without problems. We would also love for some early adopters to test this RC and provide feedback prior to a final release, especially in respect to the softsign changes. Otherwise, expect a final release next week.

The final release of Tendermint KMS v0.6.0 is out

https://crates.io/crates/tmkms/0.6.0

We are now running this release in production here at @iqlusion without issues.

The main changes from v0.6.0-rc1 are some logging improvements including more information about the height/round/step of blocks being signed, as well as their block IDs, which is useful for understanding the operation of multiple concurrent validators operating on the same network simultaneously.

Full changelog available here: https://github.com/tendermint/kms/pull/329

We’ve released a minor point release to address some issues some people have experienced: v0.6.1. Changelog here:

v0.6.1

Notably one user of v0.6.0 encountered double signing (fortunately on a testnet) while operating concurrently with two validators, owing to the handling of <nil> block IDs during PreVotes. Additionally, another validator encountered a brief outage due to a deadlock in the signal handler. Both of these issues should be addressed in this release.

We are running v0.6.1 in production here at @iqlusion on both Cosmos Hub and Terra.

We encountered an outage this morning related to bugs in Tendermint KMS v0.6.1. You can read our postmortem here:

Postmortem: 2019-08-07 Tendermint KMS-related Cosmos Hub Validator Incident •...

Last night and early this morning we encountered a series of small outages in iqlusion’s Cosmos Hub validator related to a recently released version of Tendermint KMS: v0.6.1. We are the primary contributors to Tendermint KMS and generally try to......

We recommend updating to Tendermint KMS v0.6.3. See the postmortem for more details.