nuts-foundation / nuts-foundation/nuts-node

Network protocol keeps requesting data the peer does not have

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#2,138 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Dominant language
Go
Stars
28
Forks
23
Avg merge
1d 10h
Merged PRs (30d)
76

Description

Situation:

  • Alice tries to handleTransactionList received from Bob
  • While adding one of the transactions to the DAG, it fails with dag.ErrPreviousTransactionMissing
  • Alice immediately sends a State message to Bob to restart the set reconciliation
  • Bob does not have the missing transaction so ends up sending the same transactionList as before (DB is corrupt? attacker?)
  • go back to step 1

It's unlikely that Bob is going to send a different result than last time, so it's likely to fail again.

This generates a lot of traffic since there is no delay between the two attempts. A solution is not obvious to me since adding a delay is just reducing the amount of spam a bit, but permanently blocking is not an option either.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start at the handleTransactionList flow and the dag.ErrPreviousTransactionMissing failure, then trace how Alice sends a State message and how Bob responds with the transaction list. Reproduce the repeated exchange and define completion as preventing unbounded retries or traffic while preserving a way to recover from a temporary inconsistency.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go
Domain
distributed-systems, networking
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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