SV Security

Security hardening, KMS configuration, and extra DAR notice for Super Validator nodes

Third-party Daml apps

Using an external KMS for managing participant keys

In the following, we describe how to configure an SV so that its participant keys are managed by an external KMS. This guide assumes that you are following sv-helm for deploying your SV.

Official support for the KMS-based operation of sequencers and mediators that are part of an SV deployment is planned for a future release.

Migrating an existing SV to use an external KMS for participant keys

One approach for switching to use KMS for SV participant keys while minimizing the risk of losing rewards is to:

1. Set up a fresh SV from scratch with the desired KMS configuration. (Rest of this guide.) Coordinate with the other SV operators to onboard it with weight 0.
2. Coordinate with the other SV operators to move your SV weight to the new SV, setting the weight of the older SV to 0.
3. Transfer all relevant assets from the older SV to a validator or the new KMS-enabled SV.
4. Coordinate with the other SV operators to offboard the older SV.
5. Retire the older SV.

Configuring a fresh SV to use an external KMS

In addition to configuration changes to the participant Helm chart itself, you will also need to change the way in which your CometBFT governance key is managed compared to the default setup.

External management of CometBFT governance key

By default, the CometBFT governance key is managed transparently by the SV app, using the participant for key generation and storage. The specific way in which this is realized is not supported for KMS-enabled participants. Therefore, SV operators that wish to use an external KMS for managing their participant keys must manage the CometBFT governance key of their SV externally.

This involves the following steps:

1. Generate a new CometBFT governance key.
2. Configure your SV app to use this externally generated key.

Generating a CometBFT governance key

Use the following shell commands to generate a keypair in the expected format: :

# Generate the private key
openssl genpkey -algorithm ed25519 -out cometbft-governance-keys.pem

# Extract and encode the keys
public_key_base64=$(openssl pkey -in cometbft-governance-keys.pem -pubout -outform DER | tail -c 32 | base64 | tr -d "\n")
private_key_base64=$(openssl pkey -in cometbft-governance-keys.pem -outform DER | tail -c 32 | base64 | tr -d "\n")

echo "{"
# Output the keys
echo "  \"publicKey\": \"$public_key_base64\","
echo "  \"privateKey\": \"$private_key_base64\""
echo "}"

# Clean up
rm cometbft-governance-keys.pem

These commands should result in an output similar to :

{
  "public": "A9tWyYq/HIJ3B73ym1eIUV8yqnDBligGJUE8463CBUM=",
  "private": "FDG16PaSh9hGLu2fXzEHmTECMjSyQuZnEg+w5HKCEtg="
}

Save this output to a file, e.g., cometbft-governance-keys.json.

Configuring SV app to use the externally generated CometBFT governance key

You inject the externally generated CometBFT governance key into the SV app via storing it in a k8s secret named splice-app-sv-cometbft-governance-key.

Assuming that your SV deployment resides in the sv namespace, use the following command to create the secret from the JSON file generated above: :

kubectl create secret —namespace sv generic splice-app-sv-cometbft-governance-key
—from-literal=publicKey=“$(jq -r .public cometbft-governance-keys.json)" \ --from-literal=privateKey="$(jq -r .private cometbft-governance-keys.json)”

To instruct the SV app to use the externally managed CometBFT governance key instead of generating a fresh one itself, set the cometBFT.externalGovernanceKey value in the splice-sv-node Helm chart to true. (You can comment out the respective line in splice-node/examples/sv-helm/sv-values.yaml.)

Configuring participant to use an external KMS

Beyond the changes to the SV app deployment described above, the setup of an SV participant to use an external KMS is identical to the setup of a validator participant with KMS. It involves configuration changes to the splice-participant Helm chart that depend on the KMS provider you choose.

Also recall that you need to deploy a fresh participant in order for KMS to be used correctly, which implies that you will need to set up the remaining SV components afresh as well (see above).

Google Cloud KMS

Amazon Web Services KMS