INCIDENT 003 | Gaps between published datum validity windows

[peterVG]

Trigger

• ⬛ suspected malware infections
• ⬛ access violations
• ✔️ anomalous system behaviors
• ⬛ human errors
• ⬛ unauthorized access attempts

Date

2023-10-06

Summary

The potential lag time between publications addressed in Incident 002 surfaced a secondary concern where lag, as a result of architectural choices or external factors may result in no Orcfax datum on-chain within its validity threshold.

• Lag can be internally caused: Our team initiated additional checks to improve the robustness of the validation/publication/archiving mechanism in mainnet, which resulted in lag
• Lag can be the byproduct of Cardano block interval anomalies

Status

Resolved

Additional Notes

Publication delays will continue to be a potential reality; uncertainty around Cardano block interval provides one scenario over which Orcfax has no control, and historically there have been instances where this interval has not been insignificant.

• Integrators will continue to leverage the Posix timestamp to identify the most recent publication
• The most recent will always be the largest integer out of the two if comparing
• In the future, if integrators need a more recent data point, they will be able to utilize our On Demand publication feature.

Technical improvements

In order to buffer against situations where datum publication is delayed (owing either to internal/external factors) the validity window for every datum publication will be increased.

The validity window will be increased from 3600s to 3720s.

Documentation improvements

n/a

[Christian-MK]

Removal of citations & addition of missing section from template