Harden the SRS download of `TrustedSetupProvider`

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Refactor
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
rust, wasm
Domain
cryptography

Research direction

Start with circuits/trusted_setup.rs, then inventory every TrustedSetupProvider caller and the parameters each would need to provide. Assess the wasm target and mithril-stm feature flags before choosing whether SRS acquisition moves out. Done means the target location and parameters-provider interface are recorded, streaming and retry behavior are defined, cached data is re-verified, and network and hash errors are distinct.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

cryptography :closed_lock_with_key: to-groom :thinking:

Why

The SRS is downloaded in a single blocking request, fully buffered in memory before being hashed, with no retry. A transient network error fails the whole startup, and the memory peak is proportional to the SRS size.

The same code pulls reqwest and a TLS backend into a cryptographic library, which drives the feature complexity of mithril-stm and its wasm story. Deciding where the SRS acquisition belongs shapes how the hardening is done, so both are handled together.

What

Make the download resilient and bounded in memory, re-verify what is served from the cache, and settle whether the SRS acquisition stays in mithril-stm.

How

  • Inventory the callers of TrustedSetupProvider and what they would need to provide instead
  • Assess the impact on the wasm target and on the feature flags of mithril-stm
  • Decide whether the SRS acquisition moves out of mithril-stm, and record the decision with a target location and an interface for the parameters provider
  • Stream the download and compute the SHA-256 hash incrementally (circuits/trusted_setup.rs)
  • Add bounded retries with backoff on a transient download error
  • Re-verify the hash of a cached SRS file, if the cost is acceptable, and decide whether it is done on every load or on a schedule
  • Report a clear error distinguishing a network failure from a hash mismatch
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
155
Forks
52
Avg merge
2d 17h
Merged PRs (30d)
37

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