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. This may seem strict, but any slashing event should be thoroughly investigated 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.

Vero detects slashing events in two ways:

• it listens to slashing events emitted by connected beacon nodes in its event stream

  • This is the fastest way and ensures Vero reacts as soon as a slashing event is broadcast on the network.

• it regularly polls the status of all validators

  • This serves as a fallback mechanism if the beacon node fails to emit an event or Vero misses it.

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