phil
@philbugcatcher
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Security Researcher, Resident, and Judge @cantinaxyz
Joined December 2022
🏅 4/735, and my largest payout so far. Hella ride. I looked at everything in the code, but looking != seeing. Once again, the gem is in the missed findings. Smol 🧵👇
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You don't find bugs by searching for them. You find bugs by understanding the code's smallest details.
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RT @tpiliposian: Hey chat, we’re hiring Formal Verification Engineers at Certora. I’ve noticed many security researchers in the space alre….
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RT @Votre_Inc: Our code has passed rigorous audits (proof): – Written + audited by our skilled team: ex‑OpenZeppel….
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This is one of the codebases that I have reviewed the most times. Go see if you can find anything that I missed!.
A new testbed is open: @Votre_Inc has launched a new bug bounty with rewards up to $100,000. 🪐. Votre brings liquidation free loans to crypto’s top borrowers with high LTV, low rates, and tax efficient design. Their contracts and frontend are now open for review.
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Auditing complex codebases feels like trying to comprehend an unknown creature while blindfolded. It's challenging, but not impossible. 99% of success comes from believing you *can* make sense of it, and refusing to give up until you do.
I like the shift that happens a couple of days into a complex codebase. You start out overwhelmed, having no clue how everything fits together. Towers of abstraction everywhere. Continuous confusion. Then suddenly it clicks and you're actually seeing how everything fits.
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How to be sad in 6 steps:. 1. Spot extremely intricate bug.2. Be excited.3. Write a beautiful report for it.4. Read the report and think this is too complex to go without a PoC.5. Write a PoC.6. Not a bug.
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This reinforces an idea I've had for quite a bit of time: it pays off to hunt on bug bounty programs for the heavily integrated/forked protocols. Even if I don't find any bugs, the knowledge will come in handy whenever I audit a fork or a protocol that integrates with it.
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- I have audited many stablecoin protocols, so I could spot issues this one in just a couple hours. - However, I haven't audited the target external integrations. If I knew how they worked, I would be able to cover the "integrations" half of the codebase just as quickly!.
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This protocol is a onchain collateralized stablecoin which allows users to deploy their collateral for yield. Jokes aside, I really was only able to put in a few hours, which allowed me to cover the "stablecoin" half of the codebase. There's a very valuable lesson in there,.
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🥈 2/759. I love stablecoins!. Unfortunately I was busy and only managed to put in 6 seconds in this competition. So my payout averages at just over $1.3k per second (or roughly $42 billion per year). Which means in just 3 years I will be as rich as Satoshi. Smol 🧵
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I'm gonna build the model. It's impossible to keep track of it on my mind only. The call flow goes 5 levels deep. Then it goes 4 more. Then it goes 4 more *again*, on a different branch. This is easily the hardest codebase I have audited.
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I have just found a serious problem for my excel modeling approach to auditing: storage variables that are updated more than once in the same flow, and read in between. The fact such variables are nestedmappings, and acessed/ updated through for loops makes this incredibly.
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Cantina is single-handedly bringing back the bull market _again_.
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> If I could give one advice, if you're young, join a winning team. Nothing teaches you more about winning than studying how winning teams win. You'll never be able to guess why from the outside.
Working inside Solidity taught me something counterintuitive about building successful products. Solidity has around 90% market share for smart contracts, effectively a monopoly. This puzzles people. How did a language modeled after JavaScript, often considered "inferior" to.
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RT @_hrkrshnn: This is how you win. Everyone new to crypto security should learn from Phil. He's an example of a security researcher who d….
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