Encoder (Pulp)

Pulp

Source: https://github.com/maticnetwork/heimdall/blob/master/auth/types/pulp.go

Heimdall needs to verify the transactions of Heimdall on the Ethereum chain. For that it uses RLP encoding to produce special transactions, like checkpoint.

This special transaction uses pulp (RLP based) encoding instead of default amino encoding.

Pulp uses a prefix-based simple encoding mechanism to solve interface decoding. Check GetPulpHash method.

const (
    // PulpHashLength pulp hash length
    PulpHashLength int = 4
)

// GetPulpHash returns string hash
func GetPulpHash(name string) []byte {
    return crypto.Keccak256([]byte(name))[:PulpHashLength]
}

The below returns prefix-bytes for a given msg. Here is an example on how to register an object for pulp encoding.

RegisterConcreate(name, obj) {
    rtype := reflect.TypeOf(obj)
    // set record for name => type of the object
    p.typeInfos[hex.EncodeToString(GetPulpHash(name))] = rtype
}

// register "A"
pulp.RegisterConcrete("A", A{})

Encoding is just RLP encoding and prepending hash of GetPulpHash of the name

// EncodeToBytes encodes msg to bytes
txBytes, err := rlp.EncodeToBytes(obj)
if err != nil {
    return nil, err
}

result := append(GetPulpHash("A"), txBytes[:]...), nil

Decoding works like following:

// retrieve type of objet based on prefix 
rtype := typeInfos[hex.EncodeToString(incomingData[:PulpHashLength])]

// create new object
newMsg := reflect.New(rtype).Interface()

// decode without prefix and inject into newly created object
if err := rlp.DecodeBytes(incomingData[PulpHashLength:], newMsg); err != nil {
    return nil, err
}

// result => newMsg

For more Information:

The Cosmos SDK utilizes two binary wire encoding protocols, Amino and Protocol Buffers, where Amino is an object encoding specification. It is a subset of Proto3 with an extension for interface support. See the Proto3 spec for more information on Proto3, which Amino is largely compatible with (but not with Proto2).

More here: https://docs.cosmos.network/master/core/encoding.html

Pulp#

Pulp