16. Slashing

Kortana penalizes malicious behavior by burning staked DNR and jailing the offending validator.

16.1 Double-Sign (Equivocation)

Voting for two different blocks at the same height is a Byzantine fault that threatens chain finality.

• Detection: Handled natively by the VoteAccumulator.
• Reporting: Any node can use the ktn_getEquivocationEvidence RPC method to pull the cryptographic proof of a double sign, and submit it using a ReportEquivocation (Type 0x40) transaction.
• Penalties: The validator's stake is slashed (burned) and the validator is permanently jailed (removed from the active set forever).
• Reporter Rewards: The account that submits the valid evidence receives a percentage of the slashed stake.
• Replay Protection: Evidence is checked against the slashable set and marked with a permanent jail sentinel to ensure a single proof cannot be submitted twice to drain the remaining stake.

[!CAUTION] Slashed stake is destroyed, not redistributed. This is a deliberate deflationary design choice to prevent malicious actors from attacking the network simply to earn a share of a rival's slashed funds.

16.2 Downtime

• Current Status: Missed slots are tracked at the protocol level.
• Why On-Chain Downtime Slashing is Deferred: Proving downtime cryptographically is difficult. A malicious proposer could falsely claim an honest validator missed a slot by omitting their signature from the aggregate. Until a verifiable slot-claim protocol is finalized, downtime is penalized economically (the validator misses block rewards) but does not result in a burned stake.

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