Profiles discovered that lookups into the signature cache included an
expensive comparison to the stored `sigInfo` struct. This lookup had the
potential to be more expensive than directly verifying the signature
itself!
In addition, evictions were rather expensive because they involved
reading from /dev/urandom, or equivalent, for each eviction once the
signature cache was full as well as potentially iterating over every
item in the cache in the worst-case.
To remedy this poor performance several changes have been made:
* Change the lookup key to the fixed sized 32-byte signature hash
* Perform a full equality check only if there is a cache hit which
results in a significant speed up for both insertions and existence
checks
* Override entries in the case of a colliding hash on insert Add an
* .IsEqual() method to the Signature and PublicKey types in the
btcec package to facilitate easy equivalence testing
* Allocate the signature cache map with the max number of entries in
order to avoid unnecessary map re-sizes/allocations
* Optimize evictions from the signature cache Delete the first entry
* seen which is safe from manipulation due to
the pre image resistance of the hash function
* Double the default maximum number of entries within the signature
cache due to the reduction in the size of a cache entry
* With this eviction scheme, removals are effectively O(1)
Fixes#575.
Introduce an ECDSA signature verification into btcd in order to
mitigate a certain DoS attack and as a performance optimization.
The benefits of SigCache are two fold. Firstly, usage of SigCache
mitigates a DoS attack wherein an attacker causes a victim's client to
hang due to worst-case behavior triggered while processing attacker
crafted invalid transactions. A detailed description of the mitigated
DoS attack can be found here: https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/01/23/fixed-bitcoin-vulnerability-explanation-why-the-signature-cache-is-a-dos-protection/
Secondly, usage of the SigCache introduces a signature verification
optimization which speeds up the validation of transactions within a
block, if they've already been seen and verified within the mempool.
The server itself manages the sigCache instance. The blockManager and
txMempool respectively now receive pointers to the created sigCache
instance. All read (sig triplet existence) operations on the sigCache
will not block unless a separate goroutine is adding an entry (writing)
to the sigCache. GetBlockTemplate generation now also utilizes the
sigCache in order to avoid unnecessarily double checking signatures
when generating a template after previously accepting a txn to the
mempool. Consequently, the CPU miner now also employs the same
optimization.
The maximum number of entries for the sigCache has been introduced as a
config parameter in order to allow users to configure the amount of
memory consumed by this new additional caching.
