Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Deleting $300M by messing around with Ethereum contracts

hackernoon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–45 of 45 posts

Re: Deleting $300M by messing around with Ethereum contracts

#43

Post by dorgo »

How about following solution: Each contract specifies a timedependet 'bounty' for code reviwers. A code reviewer can lock some of his ether in this contract for a specified time. If no vulnarability is found in this time then he gets his ether + % of bounty back. If a vulnarability is found during the time then his ether goes to the bug finder. Everyboddy can see how much ether the reviewers locked in a contract which could increase the confidence of users of a smart contract and encourage bug-searchers to prove that the code-reviewers were wrong. Bounty could be implemented as a % of transactions/deposits of a smart contract - which would ensure that popular smart contracts have many reviews with lots of ether locked to prove it. On the other hand a smart contract wich process only 0.01 ether in its life-time doesnt need reviews at all.

Re: Deleting $300M by messing around with Ethereum contracts

#44

Post by zweice »

dorgo wrote: post #43

How about following solution: Each contract specifies a timedependet 'bounty' for code reviwers. A code reviewer can lock some of his ether in this contract for a specified time. If no vulnarability is found in this time then he gets his ether + % of bounty back. If a vulnarability is found during the time then his ether goes to the bug finder. Everyboddy can see how much ether the reviewers locked in a contract whic…

If code reviewer doesn't report a bug before the contract is deployed he then can become the 'bug finder' taking all ether from the bounty + his own.

Even if the code reviewer is honest there are some economical problems: - Code reviewer will find a balance between time spent, amount to put into the time dependent 'bounty' and probability of a bug that didn't come up during review --> little-at-stake problem - If you force the code reviewer to put in a significant amount of ETH into the time dependent bounty you won't find any reviewers willing to work for you because of the huge risk for them --> risk problem

How would that have worked with the the Parity 'hack'? - Parity deploying their multisig contracts, having a bounty with code reviewers. AFAIK it wasn't even a bug but a not-well-deployed contract library. So the reviewers would have said that Parity should go on and deploy their multisig contract. Parity would have deployed it in a wrong way (as they did). The 'hack'/accident would still have happened.

If your time dependent contract was separate from Parity's multisig the reviewer would still get his ETH back after the time lock releases. Alternatively the reviewer's funds would also be frozen.

Hopefully formal proof of contracts will save us sometime. Alternatively blockchain with some governance scheme that takes care of something like that would also be useful. Wait a second... Am I describing Tezos? Let's wait for them to launch and see if that works better.

Re: Deleting $300M by messing around with Ethereum contracts

#45

Post by charlesdm »

danielleheong wrote: post #35

why is the ethereum price unscathed https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/ethereum/usd despite bad news?

Because the entire market cap of Ethereum is $35bn. No one cares. It was a bug in a smart contract -- not a bug in the core platform.
Post reply on HN