Validation and Application¶

The economic protocol is responsible for providing the rules that govern the Tezos network, and for enforcing that these rules implement a correct blockchain protocol. However, it does so in coordination with a Tezos shell, who ultimately implements these rules on its behalf. To this end, a Tezos economic protocol must provide the shell with an interface enabling roughly the following functionalities:

deciding whether an operation is valid, and thus can be safely included into a new block in the blockchain;
deciding whether a new block is valid, and thus can be safely appended to the blockchain;
including an operation in a block, and executing it on the blockchain state, effectively modifying the ledger state; and,
appending a new block to a Tezos blockchain, and computing the updated ledger state.

From a higher-level, abstract perspective, the validation system in the Tezos protocol implements this business logic in a functional, state-passing machine where:

Its state is given by the context, the internal representation of the state of the Tezos ledger at a given blockchain level. For instance, the context contains the information of all activated accounts and contracts, and their balances. More generally, the context must provide enough information to determine the validity of operations, and blocks.
The apply_operation method determines whether an operation is safe to be executed in a given context. If so, it proceeds to execute it and outputs the context resulting from the applied operation’s effects.
The apply method takes as input a block and a context, determines whether the block can be safely and correctly appended to the current head of the chain. If so, it appends the block to the chain and outputs the resulting context, reflecting the state of the ledger after the block has successfully been applied. apply relies on (i.e., it should call) apply_operation to validate and apply each operation in the block, and compute intermediate states.

However, the concrete API exported from the Tezos economic protocol does not implement this business logic monolithically, as described above, but it rather presents a more fine-grained API. The rationale is to provide specialized variations of the core validation and application functionality, dubbed Validation modes. For example, these modes enable the protocol to distinguish operations “in the mempool”, whose validation is triggered by the prevalidator, from operations included in newly received blocks, whose validation is triggered by the block validator, in order to localize validation rules as needed. The resulting concrete API is specified by the Protocol module in the protocol environment V11, and it is implemented by this protocol in the Main module.

The rest of this document is organized as follows: we first describe the different validation modes implemented by this Tezos economic protocol, and then we delve deeper into the particulars of validation and application for blocks and the operations supported.

Validation modes¶

The Tezos protocol provides different validation modes, intended to be used by the Tezos shell and baker software implementations when needing to apply (or to assert the validity) of blocks and operations under different, or specialized, circumstances – for example, in order to bake a block. For each of these validation modes, the API specified by the protocol environment offers an entry point so that protocol-agnostic components, the Tezos shell for instance, are able to use these different modes.

Full Application¶

The Full application mode is intended to be used to fully validate and apply blocks. In particular, this mode is used to validate and apply a known block, with a known operation trace. A Tezos shell implementation should use the full application mode to decide whether an incoming block can be safely included in the blockchain. That is, all validity checks are enabled: the block’s signature is correct, and all operations included in the block are valid; the correct amount of consensus operations have been included in order to satisfy the consensus’ threshold, etc.

Full Construction¶

The Full construction mode is intended to be used when a delegate is trying to bake a block and therefore needs to filter the validity of the desired operation trace, to include only valid operations. This mode is mostly similar to the Full application mode except that some global block validity checks are disabled, and consensus operations are validated with slightly different preconditions. For instance, since a delegate cannot sign a block while it is being built, the signature check is disabled, and it will be left to the baker to correctly sign the resulting block after its construction is finalized.

In Octez, this mode is mainly used by the baker daemon.

Partial Construction¶

The Partial construction mode, also known as Mempool mode is used by the prevalidator component of an Octez node to validate incoming operations – that is, those not-yet included into blocks. This mode’s business-logic is very close to the Full construction mode, and the differences boil down to the intended usage. The partial construction mode does not try to fully bake a block, but rather to inform the Octez prevalidator on the potential validity of operations (and whether they can safely included into a block), so that the latter can classify incoming operations, and further decide how to process them accordingly.

The protocol provides the shell with the following classification of an operation, consisting of one valid kind – Applied –, and four error kinds defined by the protocol environment:

Applied: the operation is valid and can be included in a potential block in the current context.
Temporary: the operation is invalid in the current context, but it could later become valid – in the context associated to a successor block of the current head. For instance, a manager operation whose counter value is greater than the one expected (a “counter-in-the-future” error), or the manager’s balance is insufficient to pay the operation’s fees, etc.
Branch: the operation is invalid in the current context and in any possible context from its future successors, but it might still be valid in an alternative branch. For example: a manager operation with a smaller counter than the one expected (a “counter-in-the-past” error), an unexpected attestation for the current level, etc.
Permanent: the operation is invalid in the current context, and there isn’t any plausible context where it might be or become valid. For example, an operation carrying an invalid signature.
Outdated: the operation is too old to be included in a block. Furthermore, there might be still some value in the information provided by an Outdated operation. An example is the case of an attestation which was received too late, but that could still be used to form a consensus quorum.

Partial Application¶

The Partial application mode is used for multi-pass validation. Its aim is to provide Tezos shell implementations with a light-weight (read “fast”) block application mechanism, which can determine whether a block has a chance of being valid or not, in a situation when the provided context is not a recent one. That is, when the block candidate succeeds neither the head of the chain, nor a close ancestor.

This validation mode is typically used when the node receives a significantly large branch – for instance, while bootstrapping. To check whether this branch is plausibly valid or potentially malicious spam, the shell retrieves the context from the most recent common ancestor between its current head and the announced branch, and proceeds to “partially apply” each block of this branch using the common ancestor’s context.

Indeed, by relying on the ancestor context, this mode can only assert the validity of consensus-related preconditions (attesting power, block fitness, etc.), as future consensus slots are known in advance – how much in advance being specified by the <PRESERVED_CYCLES> protocol constant. Thus, the Partial application mode provides an over-approximation of the branch’s validity, and as a result intermediate results are not committed on disk in order to prevent potential attacks.

Block Validation¶

The validity of a blocks depends on a set of precondition checks implemented in different steps, which happen at different stages of the application (and the construction) of a block.

The first step in the process is to decide whether a candidate block is well-formed, that is, that it has the expected “shape” of a valid block under the current Tezos economic protocol. Given a block candidate, the block validation process will then verify that the candidate block declares consistent level, round, and timestamp values; that it carries a valid signature, etc. At this step, the block validation process will also initialize the data-structures required for subsequent steps.

The second step iterates over the block’s operations and proceeds to apply them sequentially. When at least one operation is found to be invalid, under the conditions described in Operation Validation and Application further below, the whole block is considered as invalid.

The last step in the block validation process, known as “block finalization”, aims to verify that the collected consensus operations constitute a sufficiently large quorum. That is, it will verify that the total attesting power present in the block is greater than the CONSENSUS_THRESHOLD constant.

This sequence of three steps also yields a new context – the resulting state of the Tezos ledger after the application of the candidate block. The shell may decide to commit this context to disk.

The Tezos economic protocol also offers a cheap (read “faster”) alternative to determine an over-approximation of the validity of a block (see Partial Application above). This feature allows the shell to propagate blocks faster without needing to fully validate them, speeding-up block propagation over the network. Of course, as this is an over-approximation, this feature cannot be considered to provide a safe guarantee that a block will be valid: in particular, it does not validate all kinds of operations.

Operation Validation and Application¶

In the Tezos economic protocol, we dissociate the notion of validity from the notion of applicability for operations. A valid operation is an operation that can be included safely in a block without affecting the block’s validity. Applying an operation, on the other hand, actually performs the operation’s side-effects which can be: registering a new delegate, executing a smart contract, voting for a new protocol amendment proposal, etc.

Note that an operation may fail during the application phase, even though it has been checked as valid. For example, a smart contract call that exceeds its gas limit can be included in a block even if an error is raised at run-time. The application (that is, the operation’s side-effects) will not take effect, but fees will nonetheless be taken from the account submitting the smart contract call.

In the sequel we refine the validity conditions and describe the application process for each of the different validation passes.

Validity of Manager Operations¶

In this sub-section, we explain the conditions for manager operations (and batches of managers operations) to be considered valid and hence suitable for inclusion in a block.

Validity of Individual Manager Operations¶

Manager operation are a class of operations, issued by a single manager account which signs the operation and pays their fees. The different manager operation kinds share several common fields:

source: the public key’s hash of the source account of the manager operation – that is, the manager.
fee: the amount of tez paid to the baker which decides to include this operation;
counter: the manager account’s counter, incremented each time this account executes a manager operation, to prevent replay-attacks.
gas_limit: the maximum amount of gas that this operation may consume before failing.
storage_limit: the maximum amount of storage that this operation may require before failing.
operation: the actual operation(s) – e.g., transfers, smart-contract calls, originations, delegations, etc.
signature: the manager’s signature used to prove its identity.

A manager operation is valid if and only if all of the following conditions hold:

The operation source’s public key has been previously revealed, unless the operation is itself a Reveal operation.
The operation’s signature is correct with regard to the manager account’s public key.
The provided counter value is the expected one for the manager.
Depending on the operation’s kind, the gas_limit is high enough to cover the minimal cost of parsing the operation and further minimal treatment.
The manager account is solvent to pay the announced fees.

Validity of Manager Operation Batches¶

A batch of manager operations includes one or more manager operations for sequential and atomic execution. The atomicity property imposes that the validity of a batch should entail the validity of each individual operation in the batch, as defined above. However, it also entails some additional global constraints on manager batches.

For each of the operations present in a batch, the validation process must check that the individual constraints above are satisfied, with the exception of the signature constraint. Given that the signature concerns the whole batch, as all operations in the batch are signed by the same manager, it suffices to verify the signature only once.

The global batch validity constraint for this economic protocol is defined as the conjunction of the following conditions:

When a Reveal operation is present, it must only occur once, and it must be placed at the head of the batch – that is, the Reveal operation must be the first operation in the batch.
Every operation in the batch should declare the same source.
Each of the individual operation counters must be incremented correctly and sequentially.
The sum of each individual operation’s declared fees must be lower than the account’s balance. That is, the manager account must be solvent to pay the announced fees for all the operations in the batch.

Application of Manager Operations¶

Once the validity of a manager operation (or, a batch of manager operations) is established, the protocol proceeds to apply the operation. This first step in this application phase is to transfer the operation’s fees to the baker that included this operation. Then, the actual application depends on the operation kind. For instance, this could be a smart contract execution, enacting a delegation, or multiple actions executed as a batch. The application of a batch of manager operations consists of the sequential application of each operation in the batch, following their inclusion order – the head of the batch being the first manager operation being applied.

The application of each individual manager operation may either succeed – and therefore be reported as Applied –, or indeed fail with an error. In both cases, the fees are taken and the counter for the operation’s manager is incremented.

When a manager operation fails, every side-effect which was previously performed is backtracked. Moreover, the (rest of the) batch has to be aborted. Thus, depending on the position of the manager operation in a batch, its failure has to be propagated accordingly:

If there were other successfully applied operations in the batch prior to the offending one, the effect of each of them has to be reverted, and each of them will be reported as Backtracked.
If there were other operations pending application after the offending one, their application is aborted, and they are reported as Skipped.

For example, let’s consider a simple batch of three manager operations [op1, op2, op3], if op1 is successful but op2 fails, the ticket result for the application of the manager operation batch will report:

op1 – Backtracked, op1 was applied successfully, but after op2 failed, the operation was canceled;
op2 – Failed, the application of this particular operation failed;
op3 – Skipped, this operation was never executed because op2 had previously failed.