tendermint/SECURITY.md

Security

As part of our Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Policy, we operate a bug bounty. See the policy for more details on submissions and rewards.

Here is a list of examples of the kinds of bugs we're most interested in:

Specification

• Conceptual flaws
• Ambiguities, inconsistencies, or incorrect statements
• Mis-match between specification and implementation of any component

Consensus

Assuming less than 1/3 of the voting power is Byzantine (malicious):

• Validation of blockchain data structures, including blocks, block parts, votes, and so on
• Execution of blocks
• Validator set changes
• Proposer round robin
• Two nodes committing conflicting blocks for the same height (safety failure)
• A correct node signing conflicting votes
• A node halting (liveness failure)
• Syncing new and old nodes

Networking

• Authenticated encryption (MITM, information leakage)
• Eclipse attacks
• Sybil attacks
• Long-range attacks
• Denial-of-Service

RPC

• Write-access to anything besides sending transactions
• Denial-of-Service
• Leakage of secrets

Denial-of-Service

Attacks may come through the P2P network or the RPC:

• Amplification attacks
• Resource abuse
• Deadlocks and race conditions
• Panics and unhandled errors

Libraries

• Serialization (Amino)
• Reading/Writing files and databases
• Logging and monitoring

Cryptography

• Elliptic curves for validator signatures
• Hash algorithms and Merkle trees for block validation
• Authenticated encryption for P2P connections

Light Client

• Validation of blockchain data structures
• Correctly validating an incorrect proof
• Incorrectly validating a correct proof
• Syncing validator set changes