Reduce the overhead of seal in light clients

[junha1]

Background

Light clients (both standalone and ICS) utilize the concept of 'Update header', which is a set of data that is enough to update a light client's best header. (In abstract terms, we call this 'update of client state'.) Currently Foundry's UpdateHeader contains new_header, validator_set, and seal_for_current (for new_header).

We don't actually need all fields in the header for light clients. For example, author, parent_hash, extra_data... and even the seal However, we must provide them to light clients since they contribute to the block hash, which will be verified by the seal_for_current.

As you can see, UpdateHeader contains two seals.

Problem

You might think it's tolerable, but it's not. It has a problem with ICS. Of course ICS's light client will have the same problem of having two seals, but the worse part of doing this is that the UpdateHeader in IBC will be recorded in the transaction, and ultimately, in the block. This means that a full node will carry approximately 3 seals per block if it is Foundry-Foundry IBC and each's chain has similar block generation rate.

• one for its own block
• one for update_header.new_header.seal
• one for update_header.seal_for_current

How to solve

We can change the hashing scheme of our header to: hash(header.a1, header, a2, .... , hash(header.b1, header.b2, ...)) where a#s are fields that the light client actually uses, and b#s are not. (e.g seal) This forms a 2-depth Merkle tree and the UpdateHeader will contain only a#s + hash(header.b1, header.b2, ...), not the whole new_header.

BLS

It might be 'tolerable' if we decided to introduce BLS to master.