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Unverified Commit 2bc4ed11 authored by Alexandru Gheorghe's avatar Alexandru Gheorghe Committed by GitHub
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Prevent accidental change of network-key for active authorities (#3852)



As discovered during investigation of
https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/issues/3314 and
https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/issues/3673 there are active
validators which accidentally might change their network key during
restart, that's not a safe operation when you are in the active set
because of distributed nature of DHT, so the old records would still
exist in the network until they expire 36h, so unless they have a good
reason validators should avoid changing their key when they restart
their nodes.

There is an effort in parallel to improve this situation
https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3786, but those changes
are way more intrusive and will need more rigorous testing, additionally
they will reduce the time to less than 36h, but the propagation won't be
instant anyway, so not changing your network during restart should be
the safest way to run your node, unless you have a really good reason to
change it.

## Proposal
1. Do not auto-generate the network if the network file does not exist
in the provided path. Nodes where the key file does not exist will get
the following error:
```
Error: 
   0: Starting an authorithy without network key in /home/alexggh/.local/share/polkadot/chains/ksmcc3/network/secret_ed25519.
      
       This is not a safe operation because the old identity still lives in the dht for 36 hours.
      
       Because of it your node might suffer from not being properly connected to other nodes for validation purposes.
      
       If it is the first time running your node you could use one of the following methods.
      
       1. Pass --unsafe-force-node-key-generation and make sure you remove it for subsequent node restarts
      
       2. Separetly generate the key with: polkadot key generate-node-key --file <YOUR_PATH_TO_NODE_KEY>
```

2. Add an explicit parameters for nodes that do want to change their
network despite the warnings or if they run the node for the first time.
`--unsafe-force-node-key-generation`

3. For `polkadot key generate-node-key` add two new mutually exclusive
parameters `base_path` and `default_base_path` to help with the key
generation in the same path the polkadot main command would expect it.
 
4. Modify the installation scripts to auto-generate a key in default
path if one was not present already there, this should help with making
the executable work out of the box after an instalation.

## Notes

Nodes that do not have already the key persisted will fail to start
after this change, however I do consider that better than the current
situation where they start but they silently hide that they might not be
properly connected to their peers.

## TODO
- [x] Make sure only nodes that are authorities on producation chains
will be affected by this restrictions.
- [x] Proper PRDOC, to make sure node operators are aware this is
coming.

---------

Signed-off-by: default avatarAlexandru Gheorghe <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: default avatarDmitry Markin <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: default avatars0me0ne-unkn0wn <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: default avatarBastian Köcher <[email protected]>
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