Validators’ protection with anti-slasher
Babylon have partnership with Cubist to make Bitcoin staking — and restaking! — safe by design by fusing finality gadget with anti-slasher.
What does this means?
To protect honest validators, the Cubist key manager, CubeSigner, already tackles the unintentional-slashing and security challenges honest Ethereum validators face when managing keys (e.g., ensuring deposits and unstaking are secure). At a high-level, CubeSigner does this by using secure hardware to safeguard keys even during signing and by using a policy engine to enforce, for example, anti-slashing policies on all validator keys. The key manager with the built-in anti-slasher — which operators cannot disable — ensures that an attacker who compromises a validator machine can neither exfiltrate keys nor slash the validator. In the same way, it also prevents slashing due to validator client bugs or operational mistakes like running multiple validator clients with the same keys.
Cubist is collaborating with Babylon to bring these same strong security guarantees to the Babylon ecosystem.
As with Ethereum staking, adding first-class support for Bitcoin staking on Babylon to the CubeSigner key management platform. This means secure deposits, unstaking/unbonding, and block signing using Babylon’s extractable one-time signatures. It also means built-in anti-slashing: the key manager will, by design, refuse to sign two different messages for the same block height. Operators will be able to validate securely and without fear of slashing from the very start, since we’re collaborating with Babylon to integrate CubeSigner as a first-class, simple alternative to local keystores.
Finally, Cubist is collaborating on the design of the Babylon finality gadget with anti-slashing in mind from the start. The goal is to make anti-slashing simple. Simple means easy to get right, easy for CubeSigner to support, and easy for other (e.g., local) key managers to support, too. Read more here https://www.babylonchain.io/