Cosmos Hub explores diversified security models to promote Blockchain security innovation

Recently, the product manager of Cosmos Hub initiated a discussion on consumer chain onboarding mechanisms in the community forum, proposing two new solutions: permissionless and lightweight permissioned. This move aims to address the increasingly fierce competition in the inter-chain security space and accelerate Cosmos Hub's positioning in this area.

Last year, Cosmos Hub introduced the "Replicated Security" mechanism through the V9 Lambda upgrade, allowing it to lease its security to consumer chains, thereby enhancing the value capture capability of ATOM. However, the replicated security model requires each validator to run all consumer chains, which increases costs and limits the flexibility of consumer chains.

To address this issue, two new joining schemes have been proposed:

1. Permissionless solutions based on transactions:

   • Developers can initiate a consumer chain by submitting a transaction to the Cosmos Hub.
   • Validators choose whether to join the new Blockchain.
   • The advantage is simplicity and openness, while the disadvantage is that developers need to actively communicate with validators.

2. Lightweight Permissioned Selective Joining Scheme:

   • Developers need to submit governance proposals to initiate the consumer chain.
   • Validators decide whether to join through voting
   • Utilize the existing governance mechanism, but raise the threshold for initiation.

In addition, a "Top-N" scheme has been proposed, requiring that the top n% of the validator set must run a consumer chain, while other validators can choose to join or exit.

These new solutions all allow the use of a subset of the Cosmos Hub validator set to operate, providing more flexibility and options, although their security is not as robust as full replication security.

As early as May last year, Cosmos Hub compared three common inter-chain security solutions: replicated security, selective participation security, and mesh security. Replicated security provides the strongest protection but faces performance and cost challenges; selective participation security is flexible but has security fluctuations; mesh security allows for bi-directional enhancement of security across chains, becoming a popular solution recently.

In the future, Cosmos Hub is expected to support multiple security models, including replicated security, permissionless joining, and lightweight permissions, to meet different security needs while creating more value capture opportunities for ATOM. This diversified security strategy will bring greater flexibility and innovation space to the Cosmos ecosystem.