You are looking at a specific version 20171110:160425 of this paper. See the latest version.

Paper 2017/1090

Enter the Hydra: Towards Principled Bug Bounties and Exploit-Resistant Smart Contracts

Lorenz Breidenbach and Phil Daian and Florian Tramèr and Ari Juels

Abstract

Vulnerability reward programs, a.k.a. bug bounties, are a popular tool that could help prevent software exploits. Today, however, they lack rigorous principles for setting bounty amounts and require high payments to attract economically rational hackers. Rather than claim bounties for serious bugs, hackers often sell or exploit them. We present the Hydra Framework, the first general, principled approach to modeling and administering bug bounties and boosting incentives for hackers to report bugs. The key idea is what we call an exploit gap, a program transformation that enables runtime detection of security-critical bugs. The Hydra Framework transforms programs via N-of-N-version programming (NNVP), a variant of classical N-version programming that executes multiple independent program instances. We apply the Hydra Framework to smart contracts, small programs that execute on blockchains. We show how Hydra contracts greatly amplify the power of bounties to incentivize bug disclosure by economically rational adversaries, establishing the first framework for economic evaluation of smart contract security. We also model powerful adversaries capable of bug withholding, exploiting race conditions in blockchains to claim bounties before honest users can. We present Submarine Commitments, a countermeasure of independent interest that conceals transactions on blockchains. We present a simple core Hydra Framework for Ethereum. We report the implementation of two Hydra contracts—an ERC20 token contract and a Monty-Hall-like game.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Publication info
Preprint.
Contact author(s)
tramer @ cs stanford edu
History
2018-02-12: last of 2 revisions
2017-11-10: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2017/1090
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.