Release notes Bee v1.2.0

The bee team is proud to announce the latest v1.2.0 release!

We've been working hard to address a lot of security concerns, protocol improvements and mainnet visibility issues.

Our efforts in the past month have mainly been to add instrumentation in order to improve our protocol/component behavior visibility and we've managed to produce quite a bit of improvements as a result of a very tight feedback loop that relies on gathering and evaluation of empiric measurements of the network.

We've also added more plumbing to ensure peer blockchain synchronization and peer service level by responding to period latency checks. You can expect to see more changes in this domain with the next release as we're working hard on hardening the Swarm DHT so that service level to users is maintained.

We hope you enjoy this release!

Hardening

• Avoid advertising private CIDR underlays to the public network (#2538)
• Kademlia will now periodically ping all connected peers and will blocklist peers that consistently don't answer (#2543, #2522)
• Pushsync will continue forwarding if replication fails (#2524)
• Pullsync context cancellation has been improved peer isolation for context cancellation (#2562)
• Pushsync will store more chunks when replication requests are received (#2526)
• Malformed recursive file joiner reads are no longer possible (#2481)
• Manifest filepath handling has been improved for better security and consistency (#2489)
• Switched to each peer iterator for pushsync replication to improve replication (#2529)
• Warn on underlay mismatch on handshake (#2464)
• Verify own transaction used for overlay calculation on startup to mitigate user input error (#2422)
• Postage stamp is no longer usable when postage stamp expires (#2390)
• Prune oversaturated bins when depth increases (#2412)
• P2P disconnect and blocklist now have a reason to improve code branching observability when inspecting logs (#2471)

New features

• Added a --resync flag to force your node to resync all postage contract data on startup and more pprof profiles (#2405)
• Allow transaction from another sender for identity tx so that user onboarding can be improved (#2409)
• Added the new chainsync challenge-response protocol to verify that all connected peers are connected to a working blockchain backend (#2475)
• Added new postage endpoits for batch topup and dilution (#2410, #2401)
• Kademlia now measures peer latencies periodically using the ping-pong protocol and reports measurements using the topology endpoint and prometheus metrics (#2522)
• Kademlia can now have static nodes which are protected from kicking behavior (relevant for bootnode behavior) (#2512)
• Our libp2p abstraction adds a custom user agent and logs it on connection for better version propagation visibility on the mainnet (#2462, #2482)
• Increased targetMaxLength for PSS message mining (#2406)

Bugfixes

• Added pss target input validation (#2463)
• Chunks stamped with an already expired stamp will be skipped for syncing and eventually deleted(#2392)
• Add missing ticker stop on tag wait to avoid timer leak (#2433)
• Added CORS expose swarm-tag header for bzz dir upload (#2450)
• Improved peer announcement context handling (#2539)
• Fixed broken ENS resolution due to an external package API change (#2458)
• Local storage push index dangling item caused item pushing to grind to a halt (#2534)
• Tag UID generation improved across node restarts using a different seed (#2425)
• Improve nonce check on tx cancelled (#2395)
• Persist postage stamps when added for better reliability (#2546)
• Kademlia displayed wrong bootnode connection direction (#2570)
• Pusher tag errors are no longer fatal (#2569)
• Puller will never store max uint as topmost (#2566)
• Wait for confirmations in WaitBlock when deploying a chequebook to improve reorg safety (#2416)

Performance improvements

• Skip validation if peer is known to reduce blockchain backend calls (#2491)
• Prevent goroutine pileup on peer validation with a timeout (#2444)
• Flush kademlia metrics in separate goroutine (#2424)
• Kademlia PSlice data structure rewrite to reduce number of allocations (#2453)
• Add peer to cache if found in addressbook to reduce number of backend calls (#2511)
• Only flush dirty kademlia metrics (#2418)
• Allow dirty kademlia metrics shutdown on timeout (#2428)
• Improve inefficient kademlia metrics saving (#2452)
• Handshake handle checks with kademlia pick before overlay verification to reduce backend calls (#2541)

Misc

• Dependency management and updates (go, go-ethereum, libp2p) (#2503, #2407, #2461, #2472, #2500, #2545, #2495, #2480, #2421
• Added and improved a ton of metrics (#2487, #2490, #2502, #2498, #2513, #2520, #2509, #2484, #2497, #2508, #2514
• Cleanups and refactorings (#2429, #2437, #2469, #2451, #2439, #2333, #2468, #2527, #2548, #2444, #2427)
• Include all DNS protocol prefixes when Discovering (#2571)

Known Issues

• A local storage leak has been observed on nodes that have intensive upload activity. This is due to a storage space optimization put in place due to the postage stamp storage incentives. We are working on deploying a fix and will update you on a migration path as soon as possible!

For the full PR rundown please consult the v1.2.0 milestone

Docker images

• docker pull ethersphere/bee:1
• docker pull ethersphere/bee:1.2
• docker pull ethersphere/bee:1.2.0
• docker pull ethersphere/bee:stable
• docker pull quay.io/ethersphere/bee:1
• docker pull quay.io/ethersphere/bee:1.2
• docker pull quay.io/ethersphere/bee:1.2.0
• docker pull quay.io/ethersphere/bee:stable
• docker pull ethersphere/bee:1-slim
• docker pull ethersphere/bee:1.2-slim
• docker pull ethersphere/bee:1.2.0-slim
• docker pull ethersphere/bee:latest-slim
• docker pull ethersphere/bee:stable-slim
• docker pull quay.io/ethersphere/bee:1-slim
• docker pull quay.io/ethersphere/bee:1.2-slim
• docker pull quay.io/ethersphere/bee:1.2.0-slim
• docker pull quay.io/ethersphere/bee:latest-slim
• docker pull quay.io/ethersphere/bee:stable-slim