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OpenGDP’s security model is multi-layered, providing protection at the consensus, economic, and application levels. These guarantees ensure that developers can build on a foundation that is both reliable and resistant to attack.

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Consensus Security

OpenGDP’s consensus protocol is Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT), ensuring both safety and liveness in adversarial conditions.
  • Safety: Finalized blocks are immutable. Once a transaction is confirmed, it cannot be reverted or double-spent, as long as more than two-thirds of validators follow the protocol. There is no probabilistic finality or chain reorganization.
  • Liveness: The network continues producing blocks even if up to one-third of validators are offline or malicious. This guarantees availability and censorship resistance.
In conjunction, these properties provide a secure and predictable execution environment for applications.

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Economic Security

BFT guarantees are reinforced by economic incentives. Validators must stake collateral to participate, which is subject to slashing if they misbehave.
  • Downtime: Validators that fail to sign blocks within a defined window are penalized with a small slash, incentivizing continuous availability.
  • Double Signing: Signing conflicting blocks at the same height is treated as an attack on safety. Offending validators are heavily slashed and permanently removed from the validator set.
These mechanisms make attacks prohibitively expensive, aligning validator incentives with the network’s stability.

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Application Security

The gas system is OpenGDP’s main protection against application-level denial-of-service attacks.
  • Transaction Gas Meter: Ensures no single transaction consumes more gas than its sender has allocated.
  • Block Gas Meter: Caps the total work per block, preventing any block from overwhelming validators.
By requiring fees for every computational step, the gas model makes large-scale spam or resource exhaustion attacks economically impractical.