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Validator Architecture

Although simple and cheap to set up, a naive single-node validator with a fixed IP address and open ports to the internet is very much vulnerable to attacks, in particular to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. A compromised validator will miss blocks, lead to delegator stake loss due to slashing, and is potentially harmful to the network health in general.

To mitigate these risks and ensure high availability and rewards generation, we've implemented the Sentry Node Architecture that is considered one of the best practice validator setups across the Cosmos ecosystem.

In short, our active validator node is always shielded from the direct internet by multiple sentry nodes across multiple provider regions. We've carefully configured our validator node's firewall to only allow incoming connections from our sentry nodes, and any public internet connections (including attacks) must go through the sentry nodes. Should a DDoS attack take down one or more sentry nodes, new sentry nodes will be quickly spun up to keep our validator active on the network. We also have a standby backup validator node that is ready to take over should anything happen to the active validator.