Theseus: A Wormhole spy node implementation in Rust

Wormhole spy nodes are the types of nodes that don't participate in consensus or VAA attestations but listen to messages passed on by the guardian nodes to each other in the p2p network.

Running

• Build the files using cargo b -r
• Then run cargo install --path . to install the package
• Run theseus run

Technically, by design, a typical wormhole spy node basically consists of two main processes:

• A p2p networking stack.
• A gRPC server to serve messages to subscribers.

Here's how the p2p stack works at a high level:

• The node first generates an Ed25519 keypair if a keypair doesn't exist already.
• The node takes in a string slice parses it into a libp2p Multiaddress and a PeerID, this is the PeerId and multiaddress of the node that we will be dialing to later in the process. This would be the address of our bootstrap node.
• Then we setup Kademlia, which is a distributed Hash table designed for decentralized peer-to-peer networks, using libp2p's implementation. This adds the multiaddress and the peer id of the bootstrap node to our Kademlia DHT.
• Then we setup the transport layer for our node, we use an older version of Quic as the nodes use an older version of quic as described in draft-29. However wormhole will soon upgrade to quic-v1 based on my chats with the wormhole core devs.
• After setting up quic, we move on to setting up the Gossipsub protocol, this is the protocol that our test node will use to communicate and listen to messages from the wormhole guardian network, we make a gossipsub topic called /wormhole/mainnet/2/broadcast, if we need to connect to a testnet node then: /wormhole/testnet/broadcast.
• We also have a ping protocol just to examine the liveness of our connection to the bootstrap node, if the bootstrap node is still connected to our test node, the pings will continue to log at regular intervals.
• We build the Swarm object with above configurations and start listening on these addresses /ip4/0.0.0.0/udp/8999/quic and /ip6/::/udp/8999/quic
• Lastly, we set an async event loop to listen for messages through the event interface provided by libp2p.

gRPC Service

The gRPC server is implemented in the server.rs file. It has a few necessary event handlers like handling SignedVAAwithQuorum or SignedObservation messages from gossip. A custom client implementation can be run to listen to these events for further process.