Snapshot validator for Lisk

Double check your snapshots!

A tool to validate the data integrity of a Lisk snapshot.

Security note: even though this tool checks a lot of data consistency, it is far from perfect. Thus a validated snapshot can still contain corrupted data. Thus keep choosing snapshot providers wisely.

Design principles

• Read-only (does not produce or change snapshots)
• Fast runtime (validates 10k blocks/second on a 4 year old laptop)
• Independent development (to avoid copying bugs)
• Return code is king: 0 for success, everything else for error (output text is debugging only)

Prerequirements

• A postgres server must be running
• createdb test_database_xyz must work for the current user

How to install/compile

• Install libpq-dev, libsodium-dev, pkg-config, cmake, a C++ compiler, and Python, using your favourite package manager.
• git clone --recursive https://github.com/prolina-foundation/snapshot-validator.git
• cd snapshot-validator/external/libpqxx
• ./configure --disable-documentation --prefix="$PWD/../libpqxx-installation" && make -j 4 install
• cd ../..
• mkdir build && cd build
• cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .. && make -j 4
• Now move the resulting binary validate-snapshot-database into PATH, e.g. sudo mv validate-snapshot-database /usr/local/bin

How to use

• Ensure validate-snapshot-database is in PATH: validate-snapshot-database --help
• Run ./validate-snapshot-file testnet <testnet snapshot file>

Further notes

• Temporary databases are not dropped when validation fails. Use a Postgres management tool like e.g. pgAdmin to clean up from time to time.
• Mainnet validation consumes 4.5 GiB of memory on Linux because all transactions are kept in memory

License

MIT