Slashing Protection

Proactive Measures

• Slashing Protection Database

  Vero relies on the battle-tested slashing protection provided by the attached remote signer. An additional layer of slashing protection may be added directly to Vero in the future.

• Doppelganger Detection

  Vero supports detecting active doppelganger validators on the network during its startup. Doppelgangers are identical validators running elsewhere. Running the same validator in multiple locations can lead to slashing, as they may emit conflicting votes.

  If Vero detects active doppelgangers, it will refuse to start validator duties and shut down instead.

Reactive Measures

• Slashing Event Detection

  Vero closely monitors validator slashing events happening on the network and stops performing validator duties for all of its validators whenever it detects any of them have been slashed. While strict, this helps ensure that slashing events get properly reviewed before duties are resumed. A slashing event should never occur in a properly configured environment, therefore, if such an event does occur, it indicates a larger issue.

  The slashing_detected metric exposes the status of the slashing detection mechanism and is also displayed in the overview section of the Grafana dashboard: