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As I write this, I’m sitting in the London office thinking about how I can give you a good overview of the work we’ve been doing to secure the Ethereum protocols, its clients, and the p2p network. As you may recall, I joined the Ethereum team at the end of last year to manage the security audit. As spring has passed and summer has arrived, and in the meantime many audits have concluded, now is the time for me to share some of the findings from the World Computer Machinery Room inspection. 😉
This is very clear, as much as customer delivery is a complex product development process, it is an exciting but very complex research effort. The latter is why the best-planned development schedule is subject to change as we find out more about our problem domain.
The security audit process began at the end of last year with an overall strategy in place to ensure maximum security for Ethereum. As you know, we have a security-driven development process, rather than a schedule-driven development process. With this in mind, we have developed a multi-level audit approach consisting of:
- Analyzes of new protocols and algorithms by blockchain researchers and specialist software security companies
- A comprehensive protocol and implementation audit by a world-class security consulting firm (Go followed by C++ and a basic review of the educational Python client), as well as
- the Bug bounty program.
Analyzes of new protocols and algorithms covered topics such as the security of:
- Gas economics
- Newly designed ASIC-resistant working puzzle as well
- Economic incentive for contract mining.
The “crowd-sourced” audit component began around Christmas alongside our bug bounty program. We have set aside an 11-digit amount of Satoshi to reward people who discover bugs in our code. We have seen very high quality Submissions For our bug bounty program, anglers have received similar rewards. The bug bounty program is still running and we need more submissions to use the allocated budget…
The first major security audit (covering gas economics and the proof-of-work puzzle) was initiated by security consulting firm Least Authority in January and continued through the end of winter. We are very pleased that we have agreed with most of our external auditors that these audit reports will be available to the public once the audit work is completed and the results are fixed. So, along with this blog post, we are happy to bring you “Less Power”. Audit report And accompaniment Blog post. Additionally, the report contains useful recommendations for application developers to ensure secure design and deployment of contracts. We expect to publish more reports as they become available.
We also engaged another software security firm at the beginning of the year to provide audit coverage for the Go implementation. Due to the increased security that comes with many clients and as Gav mentioned in his previous post, we have also decided to give Python and C++ a light security audit starting in early July. Your C++ code will receive a full audit immediately after – Our goal with this approach is to ensure that there are multiple validator clients available as early as possible during the release process.
We began this more comprehensive audit of a Go customer, also known as a “end-to-end audit,” in February with a one-week workshop that will be followed by weeks of regular check-in calls and weekly audit reports. The audit is embedded in a comprehensive process for tracking, fixing, and managing errors Track on github By Gustav together with Christoph and Dimitri coded the corresponding required tests.
As the name suggests, the end-to-end audit is scoped to cover “everything” (from networking to the Ethereum VM to the synchronization layer to the PoW) so that at least one auditor examines the different core layers of Ethereum. One consultant recently summed up the situation very succinctly: “To be honest, Ethereum’s testing needs are more complex than anything I’ve looked at before.” As Jaff mentioned in his Latest blog postGiven the significant changes in networking and synchronization strategy, we’ve finally decided to commission more audit work for Go – which we’re about to finish this week. Comprehensive audits for core C++ and Python are now underway.
Auditing work along with bug fixing and regression testing as well as related refactoring and redesign (of networking and synchronization layer) make up the majority of the work that keeps developers busy at the moment. Likewise, fixing results, redesign, and regression testing are reasons for delays in delivery. Additionally, the Olympic testing phase taught us a lot about resilience under different scenarios, such as slow connections, bad peers, peers who behaved strangely, and outdated peers. The biggest challenge by far is fighting and recovering from the spikes. We have learned a lot from recovery attempts regarding the processes required when it comes to dealing with these type of scenarios and incidents.
It may come as no surprise that various audits represent a significant expense – and we believe the money could not be better invested.
As we approach release, security and reliability have become increasingly top of mind, especially in light of a range of critical issues found in the Olympic test release. We are extremely grateful for the enthusiasm and thorough work done by all our auditors so far. Their work helped us improve the specifications in the Yellow Report, eliminate ambiguity, fix many fine-grained issues, and help us identify a number of implementation bugs.
