Qortal Core - Main Code Repository Decentralized Data Network - Blockchain - TRUE Cross-Chain Trading - Application and Website Hosting - Much More - Qortal is the future internet infrastructure for the global digital world.

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Auto Updates

Theory

Using a specific git commit (e.g. abcdef123) we produce a determinstic JAR with consistent hash.
To avoid issues with over-eager anti-virus / firewalls we obfuscate JAR using very simplistic XOR-based method.
Obfuscated JAR is uploaded to various well-known locations, usually including github itself, referenced in settings.
An ARBITRARY transaction is published by a non-admin member of the "dev" group (groupID 1) with:
- 'service' set to 1
- txGroupId set to dev groupID, i.e. 1 and containing this data:
- git commit's timestamp in milliseconds (8 bytes)
- git commit's SHA1 hash (20 bytes)
- SHA256 hash of obfuscated JAR (32 bytes)
Admins of dev group approve above transaction until it reaches, or exceeds, dev group's approval threshold (e.g. 60%).
Nodes notice approved transaction and begin auto-update process of:
- checking transaction's timestamp is greater than node's current build timestamp
- checking git commit timestamp (in data payload) is greater than node's current build timestamp
- downloading update (obfuscated JAR) from various locations using git commit SHA1 hash
- checking downloaded update's SHA256 hash matches hash in transaction's data payload
- calling ApplyUpdate Java class to shutdown, update and restart node

Obfuscation method

The same method is used to obfuscate and de-obfuscate:

XOR each byte of the file with 0x5A

Typical download locations

The git SHA1 commit hash is used to replace %s in various download locations, e.g.:

https://github.com/QORT/qortal/raw/%s/qortal.update
https://[email protected]/QORT/qortal/%s/qortal.update

These locations are part of the org.qortal.settings.Settings class and can be overriden in settings.json like:

  "autoUpdateRepos": [
    "http://mirror.qortal.org/auto-updates/%s",
    "https://[email protected]/Qortal/%s"
  ]

The latter entry is an example where the IP address is provided, bypassing name resolution, for situations where DNS is unreliable or unavailable.

XOR tool

To help with manual verification of auto-updates, there is a XOR tool included in the Qortal JAR. It can be used thus:

$ java -cp qortal.jar org.qortal.XorUpdate
usage: XorUpdate <input-file> <output-file>
$ java -cp qortal.jar org.qortal.XorUpdate qortal.jar qortal.update
$