-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 115
Product Overview
We build Interchain Security towards fulfilling Informal's Vision of creating a secure, sustainable and scalable Interchain serviced by the Cosmos Hub. Our contribution is twofold:
- It enables chains to borrow security from more established chains (e.g., Cosmos Hub), in order to boost their own security, i.e., increase the cost of attacking their networks.
- It enables hub minimalism, which entails keeping a hub in the Cosmos network (e.g., the Cosmos Hub) as simple as possible, with as few features as possible in order to decrease the attack surface.
Interchain Security is a feature that allow a provider chain (e.g., the Cosmos Hub) to share security with other chains, referred to as consumer chains. Informal Systems has been building out Interchain Security v1, which we refer to as Replicated Security. With replicated security, consumer chains get the entire security of the provider chain's validator set. This is accomplished by the validator set of the provider chain running each consumer chain's code as well, and being subject to slashing for downtime or double signing.
There are also several other forms of Interchain Security:
- Opt-in Security is exactly the same mechanism as replicated security, but validators on the Cosmos Hub can choose whether or not they want to validate a given consumer chain.
- Layered (or Mesh) Security is the ability for a consumer chain to get security from multiple providers
See this blog post for more details on the different versions of Interchain Security.
-
Specification: Interchain Security is an IBC application and, thus, it is specified as an Interchain Standard, see ICS-28.
-
Architecture: We use Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) to track major decisions on how the Interchain Security software is evolving. See here all our ADRs.
-
QA: The overview of the quality assurance process necessary for the release of Interchain Security can be found here.
TBA
- Project board: https://github.com/orgs/cosmos/projects/25.
- Specification work: https://github.com/orgs/cosmos/projects/25/views/10
- If you want to start a consumer chain, checkout the consumer chain guide.
- For an overview of the Interchain Security protocol, see the Overview and Basic Concepts section of the specification.
- If you are an Informal employee, here you can find a list of IBC onboarding materials.
- Product owner: Jehan Tremback @jtremback.
- For general inquiries with Informal: Please get in touch with us at [email protected].