Crypto Worker

The crypto worker is responsible for handling crypto operations in Corda, such as signing. It is the only worker that hosts keys owned by the Corda cluster A complete set of worker processes. Clusters require a fully functioning virtual node infrastructure. , as well as keys owned by the virtual nodes required for crypto operations.

The keys of the virtual nodes are stored in dedicated databases per virtual node The combination of the context of a user and the ephemeral compute instances created to progress a transaction on that identity's behalf. , while the keys of the Corda cluster are stored in a dedicated database for cluster keys. In addition to the database, there are caches universal to all virtual nodes that hold the keys in memory for faster lookup.

The crypto requests can be categorized into flow Communication between participants in an application network is peer-to-peer using flows. requests and everything else. Flow requests to the crypto processor are of more importance in terms of metrics as they occur frequently and impact the time taken to complete flows. With the crypto worker metrics, you can measure the below crypto requests within the crypto worker:

• Flow-crypto requests, which consist of the operations:

  • SigningService.sign: The sign operation is initiated on the flow side and is performed in the crypto processor. It sends the bytes to be signed, along with the public part of the signing key and the signature spec, to the crypto worker. On the crypto worker side, the crypto worker attempts to find the key in the keys hosted for the virtual node that sent the request and if found, it signs the bytes and returns the signature. The metrics in the following table pertain to the time taken to handle the entire sign request. Additionally, there are more detailed metrics related to key caches and the sign operation itself.
  • SigningService.findMySigningKeys: The findMySigningKeys operation sends a set of public keys to the crypto worker, which then filters and returns the keys owned by the calling virtual node. The metrics in the following table are related to the time taken to handle the entire findMySigningKeys request. Additionally, there are metrics related to key caches.

• Admin or other requests, which involve operations such as creating a new key pair for a virtual node, or list information about the keys owned by a virtual node. Regarding metrics for these requests, the following metrics pertain to the time taken to handle the requests as a whole.

Tags:

• operation_name: The name of the operation that the metric is related to.
• tenant: The identifier of a tenant: it’s either a virtual node identifier or a category for cluster level keys, for example TLS Transport Layer Security. A protocol that establishes an encrypted session between two computers on the Internet. .
• signature_spec: The signature signing scheme name to create signatures during crypto signing operations.
• lookup_method: The method used to look up signing key IDs, either public key IDs or public key short IDs.
• publickey_type: The type of public key used in sign operations.