Mithril Aggregator Node
Welcome to the Mithril Aggregator Node guide!
Introduction​
The Mithril Aggregator is a trustless node that orchestrates the work of the Mithril Signer nodes and that gathers their individual signatures to produce Mithril multi signatures and their associated certificates. It is also in charge of creating and storing the ledger state snapshot archive.
For more information about the Mithril Protocol, please refer to the Protocol in depth page.
For more information about the Mithril Aggregator, please refer to the Developer Documentation page.
Trustless Orchestration​
The primary goal of the Mithril Aggregator is to orchestrate and synchronize the Mithril multi signatures production:
When a new snapshot is ready to be produced (and certified), the Mithril Aggregator creates and broadcasts a new Beacon that indicates to the Mithril Signers which point in time they should use to compute the message (or digest) to sign.
It is also responsible for advertising the Verification Keys (Mithril public keys) of all the registered Mithril Signers.
The Beacon, the current Protocol Parameters and the available Verification Keys are gathered and advertised in a Pending Certificate.
The Mithril Signers can register with it, in order to be able to later participate in the signature process.
An important fact is that the Mithril Aggregator is trustless:
Anyone could run an aggregator on the network.
It does not broadcast any sensitive information (such as the message that needs to be signed). The signer nodes are responsible for computing these information directy from a Cardano Node on top of which they run.
Also, in order to aggregate single signatures into Mithril multi signatures, the *Mithril Aggregator does not need to represent any share of the total stakes of the Cardano Network.
Multi Signature and Certificate Production​
The Mithril Aggregator is in charge of producing the Mithril multi signatures and their associated certificates for a part and/or all of the ledger state (the snapshots):
The previously registered Mithril Signers are able to produce individual signatures. They send these individual signatures to the Mithril Aggregator that checks their validity and then store them.
Once the quorum of individual signatures has been reached, the Mithril Aggregator is able to produce a multi signature.
The Mithril Aggregator combines the multi signature and some metadata into a Mithril Certificate that will be later used by the Mithril Client to verify the authenticity of a snapshot.
For more information about the Mithril Certificate Chain, please refer to the Certificate Chain page.
Snapshot Artifacts Production​
In its first version, the Mithril Aggregator also takes care of producing the artifacts associated to the snapshot (e.g. the snapshot archive that will be later used by a Mithril Client).
It is worthy to mention that this role is endorsed only for convenience at the moment, and that on the long run the artifacts production will be delegated to a separate Mithril Snapshotter node.
Once the snapshot artifact is created, it can be synchronized anywhere:
On the Mithril Aggregator itself.
On any cloud platform that provides a CDN.
On a separate peer to peer network (such as IPFS or Bittorrent).
The Mithril Certificate is part of a chain of certificates that are involved in the snapshot authenticity verification and is stored:
On the Mithril Aggregator itself
Or on any accessible storage (as a cloud storage for example)
Snapshot Artifacts and Certificate Distribution​
In case the Mithril Aggregator stores the snapshot artifacts and/or the certificates, it can be used to distribute these data to remote clients. These clients can use them according to their need and verify that are genuine.
Under the hood​
In its first version, the Mithril Aggregator is composed of two main components:
- A REST API, that enables the Mithril Signers to:
- Retrieve other registered signers Verification Keys.
- Register their Verification Keys.
- Register their Individual Signatures.
The documentation of the REST API of the Mithril Aggregator is available here.
- A runtime that is powered by a state machine:
- The runtime is synchronous and is scheduled to execute at regular intervals.
- There are three possible states: IDLE , READY and SIGNING.
- The runtime handles state transitions.
- The runtime is summarized in the diagram below:
