serai/mini

Mini Serai

A miniature version of the Serai stack, intended to demonstrate a lack of system-wide race conditions in the officially stated flows.

Why

When working on multiple multisigs, a race condition was noted. Originally, the documentation stated that the activation block of the new multisig would be the block after the next Batch's block. This introduced a race condition, where since multiple Batchs can be signed at the same time, multiple Batchs can exist in the mempool at the same time. This could cause Batchs [1, 2] to exist in the mempool, 1 to be published (causing 2 to be the activation block of the new multisig), yet then the already signed 2 to be published (despite no longer being accurate as it only had events for a subset of keys).

This effort initially modeled and tested this single race condition, yet aims to grow to the entire system. Then we just have to prove the actual Serai stack's flow reduces to the miniature flow modeled here. While further efforts are needed to prove Serai's implementation of the flow is itself free of race conditions, this is a layer of defense over the theory.

How

loom is a library which will execute a block of code with every possible combination of orders in order to test results aren't invalidated by order of execution.