Researchers: Last Year’s ICOs Had Five Security Vulnerabilities on Average
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Researchers: Last Year’s ICOs Had Five Security Vulnerabilities on Average
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Re: Researchers: Last Year’s ICOs Had Five Security Vulnerabilities on Average
#2It's a pretty interesting topic/field to get in if you're a security researcher, just because everyone is starting from zero and a lot of vulnerabilities are quite surprising.
If you're interested we've made a TOP 10 of issues with smart contracts here: https://www.dasp.co
Re: Researchers: Last Year’s ICOs Had Five Security Vulnerabilities on Average
#3> "Typically, these would consist of non compliance with the ERC20 standard"
Given that ERC20 standard was ratified in the 3rd quarter of last year, ~70% through the year, and only ~70% of ICOs had this issue...
Re: Researchers: Last Year’s ICOs Had Five Security Vulnerabilities on Average
#4> ..contained vulnerabilities in smart contracts, the heart and soul of an ICO
> Once an ICO starts, the contract cannot be changed and is open to everyone
Many teams have upgraded their contract without an issue. The market has stopped reacting to it completely. They just release a new contract and airdrop it to all existing holders. Notify the exchanges, and it is business as usual.
This is more of a FYI. I'm not really curious about what this particular research group is doing, or why this article uses "vulnerability" without the distinction of how benign these things are.
Re: Researchers: Last Year’s ICOs Had Five Security Vulnerabilities on Average
#5So far, we have a long way to go to build higher quality code. There's a few reasons:
1. Blockchain smart contracts are often unchangeable, so you can't fix bugs
2. The language is being built as people write code, with some bad design choices that encourage mistakes (slowly being fixed)
3. Libraries are still being developed
4. Tooling is still limited (even basic linting)
5. People are not taking the time to have a beta process.
6. People prematurely optimize gas, at the cost of readability
(For non-Ethereum devs, here's a short tutorial for how the language works: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/solidity/ )
My own view is that you have to code expecting that things go wrong, and ensure that your logic survives inevitable mistakes ('resiliency').
There's a lot of great resources on security, for people interested in this space:
Ethereum Safety: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Safety
Decentralized Application Security Project: https://dasp.co/
Consensys Smart Contract Best Practice Guide (I helped coauthor this back in 2016 after the DAO): https://consensys.github.io/smart-contract-best-practices/
Hacking Distributed is a great blog for blockchain security:
http://hackingdistributed.com/
Emin and Phil Daian are great to follow on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/el33th4xor
Audit Checklist (written by my team): https://github.com/cryptofinlabs/audit-checklist
(Disclosure: Our team does audits for a few projects: http://audit.cryptofin.io/index.html )
Feel free to add other resources to this thread. Imagine it'll be useful for everyone.
Re: Researchers: Last Year’s ICOs Had Five Security Vulnerabilities on Average
#6> ..contained vulnerabilities in smart contracts, the heart and soul of an ICO > Once an ICO starts, the contract cannot be changed and is open to everyone Many teams have upgraded their contract without an issue. The market has stopped reacting to it completely. They just release a new contract and airdrop it to all existing holders. Notify the exchanges, and it is business as usual. This is more of a FYI. I'm not r…
There are still downstream effects with this. Exchanges, financial products on top, all have to deal with this. And this also goes against decentralization.
Re: Researchers: Last Year’s ICOs Had Five Security Vulnerabilities on Average
#7> ..contained vulnerabilities in smart contracts, the heart and soul of an ICO > Once an ICO starts, the contract cannot be changed and is open to everyone Many teams have upgraded their contract without an issue. The market has stopped reacting to it completely. They just release a new contract and airdrop it to all existing holders. Notify the exchanges, and it is business as usual. This is more of a FYI. I'm not r…
Airdrops don't seem like a complete solution to me. If someone sells a lot of stolen/hacked tokens, it still decreases the value of the airdropped tokens, since there's absolutely no recourse once the stolen ones are converted to something else. The only way to stop a hacked contract from becoming a problem is if every path to liquidity is immediately halted, but I'm not sure its realistic to do that. I'm sure there is always a long tail of exchanges and holders still transacting in the hacked tokens. People are still transacting in ETC, lol.
People not caring is probably just due to the crazy risk and volatility in crypto in general.
Re: Researchers: Last Year’s ICOs Had Five Security Vulnerabilities on Average
#8> ..contained vulnerabilities in smart contracts, the heart and soul of an ICO > Once an ICO starts, the contract cannot be changed and is open to everyone Many teams have upgraded their contract without an issue. The market has stopped reacting to it completely. They just release a new contract and airdrop it to all existing holders. Notify the exchanges, and it is business as usual. This is more of a FYI. I'm not r…
Airdrops don't seem like a complete solution to me. If someone sells a lot of stolen/hacked tokens, it still decreases the value of the airdropped tokens, since there's absolutely no recourse once the stolen ones are converted to something else. The only way to stop a hacked contract from becoming a problem is if every path to liquidity is immediately halted, but I'm not sure its realistic to do that. I'm sure there…
Most "smart contract vulnerabilities" don't involve the ability to steal them.
Again like I said, I don't know why this article doesn't point out how benign most of these things are.
so for the one example you presented, thats right it isn't a complete solution, and that one example requires its own individual discussion. This article doesn't distinguish about the level of severity of the vulnerability
the reality is that most of these are as benign as any random website not getting 100% in a cursory test
Re: Researchers: Last Year’s ICOs Had Five Security Vulnerabilities on Average
#9> ..contained vulnerabilities in smart contracts, the heart and soul of an ICO > Once an ICO starts, the contract cannot be changed and is open to everyone Many teams have upgraded their contract without an issue. The market has stopped reacting to it completely. They just release a new contract and airdrop it to all existing holders. Notify the exchanges, and it is business as usual. This is more of a FYI. I'm not r…
If that's what they're doing then why not just do an auction on a web site? What's the point of using the block chain if your solution to any problem is to go around it anyway?
Re: Researchers: Last Year’s ICOs Had Five Security Vulnerabilities on Average
#10> ..contained vulnerabilities in smart contracts, the heart and soul of an ICO > Once an ICO starts, the contract cannot be changed and is open to everyone Many teams have upgraded their contract without an issue. The market has stopped reacting to it completely. They just release a new contract and airdrop it to all existing holders. Notify the exchanges, and it is business as usual. This is more of a FYI. I'm not r…
If that's what they're doing then why not just do an auction on a web site? What's the point of using the block chain if your solution to any problem is to go around it anyway?
The idea is generally to get to the point where minimal maintenance is necessary
The distributed ledger technology makes it easy to offload accounting and user management, which helps you quickly bootstrap the supply and demand side of a network much faster while coupling that with the capital you need or simply want.
These are typically catch-22 problems for other kinds of networks, VC backed or otherwise. It is dime a dozen in silicon valley to have a company that raised 10 million in a series A to barely have 10,000 users before ultimately closing the doors and giving nothing to its vested common stock employee/holders.
Not too much different with ICOs, except people get more than nothing and don't have to wait for it.