Producer / Relay isolation and topology updater (from the security perspective)

[mcrio]

I guess until P2P is implemented (Q4 2021 I believe) it’s something that you can use but don’t have to, and I agree there are some risks involved.

There is a recent, related thread:

Why do we need the topology updater?

As far as I know, this is a temporary mechanism to keep a useful list of relays the topologyupdater can use to create their static topology. So when you online a new relay the topologyupdater will use this list to create its initial topology list. I am guessing here but I would say we don’t want a system that is dependent on too many things like apis and other websites as you mentioned. We got just 1 simple json which is updated through the explained topologyupdater. And from my experience wo…

• If the topology not only fetched, but also pushed (which seems to be the default setting), it sends along the IP of the block producer - why would that be needed?

As TopologyUpdater generates the complete topology file server-side, I guess it was the easiest approach for the author to include non public details into the file. You can always skip sending the BP IP and write your own script that inserts that IP into the generated file, or do it manually.