While investigating an issue in Hermes where it failed to relay ICS-04 packets containing non-UTF-8 data, we realized that ibc-go emits event attributes which are not valid UTF-8 strings, specifically the packet_data and packet_ack event attributes.
Such events fail to decode from Protobuf, because the tendermint.abci.Event proto that we use is the one from CometBFT v0.37+ which specifies that the key and value fields be valid UTF-8 strings.
I suggest we change the version of tendermint.abci.Event to v0.34, where attributes are allowed to be any byte array. In Protobuf, bytes and string are wire-compatible, so doing this would strictly increase the amount fo data we can parse.
While investigating an issue in Hermes where it failed to relay ICS-04 packets containing non-UTF-8 data, we realized that ibc-go emits event attributes which are not valid UTF-8 strings, specifically the
packet_dataandpacket_ackevent attributes.Such events fail to decode from Protobuf, because the
tendermint.abci.Eventproto that we use is the one from CometBFT v0.37+ which specifies that thekeyandvaluefields be valid UTF-8 strings.I suggest we change the version of
tendermint.abci.Eventto v0.34, where attributes are allowed to be any byte array. In Protobuf,bytesandstringare wire-compatible, so doing this would strictly increase the amount fo data we can parse.See this Hermes PR for background information: https://github.com/informalsystems/hermes/pull/3768