As part of our vulnerability disclosure policy, we operate a bug bounty.

See the policy for more details on submissions and rewards, and see "Example Vulnerabilities" (below) for examples of the kinds of bugs the team is most interested in.

We require that all researchers:

• Use the bug bounty to disclose all vulnerabilities, and avoid posting vulnerability information in public places, including Github Issues, Discord channels, and Telegram groups
• Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems (including but not limited to the Uptick mainnet and/or testnets), and destruction of data
• Keep any information about vulnerabilities that you’ve discovered confidential between yourself and the engineering team until the issue has been resolved and disclosed
• Avoid posting personally identifiable information, privately or publicly

If you follow these guidelines when reporting an issue to us, we commit to:

• Not pursue or support any legal action related to your research on this vulnerability
• Work with you to understand, resolve and ultimately disclose the issue in a timely fashion

Tharsis uses the following disclosure process:

1. Once a security report is received, the team works to verify the issue and confirm its severity level using CVSS.
2. The team determines the vulnerability’s potential impact on Uptick.
3. Patches are prepared for eligible releases of Uptick in private repositories. See “Supported Releases” below for more information on which releases are considered eligible.
4. We notify the community that a security release is coming, to give users time to prepare their systems for the update. Notifications can include forum posts, tweets, and emails to partners and validators.
5. 24 hours following this notification, the fixes are applied publicly and new releases are issued.
6. The team updates their Uptick and Ethermint dependencies to use these releases, and then themselves issue new releases.
7. Once releases are available for Uptick and Ethermint we notify the community, again, through the same channels as above. We also publish a Security Advisory on Github and publish a CVE (if applicable), as long as neither the Security Advisory nor the CVE include any information on how to exploit these vulnerabilities beyond what information is already available in the patch itself.
8. Once the community is notified, we will pay out any relevant bug bounties to submitters.
9. One week after the releases go out, we will publish a post with further details on the vulnerability as well as our response to it.

This process can take some time. Every effort will be made to handle the bug in as timely a manner as possible, however it's important that we follow the process described above to ensure that disclosures are handled consistently and to keep Ethermint and its downstream dependent projects--including but not limited to Uptick--as secure as possible.

The team commits to releasing security patch releases for both the latest minor release as well for the major/minor release that Uptick is running.

If you are running older versions of Uptick, we encourage you to upgrade at your earliest opportunity so that you can receive security patches directly from the repo. While you are welcome to backport security patches to older versions for your own use, we will not publish or promote these backports.

Please note that, in the interest of the safety of our users and staff, a few things are explicitly excluded from scope:

• Any third-party services
• Findings from physical testing, such as office access
• Findings derived from social engineering (e.g., phishing)

The following is a list of examples of the kinds of vulnerabilities that we’re most interested in. It is not exhaustive: there are other kinds of issues we may also be interested in!

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

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

Assuming more than 1/3 the voting power is Byzantine:

• Attacks that go unpunished (unhandled evidence)

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

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

Attacks may come through the P2P network or the RPC layer:

• Amplification attacks
• Resource abuse
• Deadlocks and race conditions

• Serialization
• Reading/Writing files and databases

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

• Core verification
• Bisection/sequential algorithms