111 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2024
  2. Oct 2023
    1. Mathematician Claude Shannon with his labyrinth-traversing mouse Theseus, invented in 1950.

      The essay does mention Shannon, but it doesn't really explain why bits are the smallest possible unit of information, defined in a way that relates to entropy in thermodynamics.

  3. Aug 2022
    1. While the 푐 cannot be measured directly from technicalmethods, it requires analysis of specific social situations, sothe oracle problem is controversial in terms of social issues.

      Example of controversial social problem for oracles

    1. However, the thesis is confirmed mainly by the fact that, on October 2020, an attacker used a flash loan to borrow enough MKR to pass a governance proposal to change the MKR oracle whitelist parameter and managed to push his feeder to the allowlist

      Hard to fit into a specific taxonomy

    2. Miners Extractable Value (MEV) Problem”

      Since blockchain is publicly auditable, it is also possible to have a look at pending transactions that have still to be confirmed. If, for example, in the transaction pool, we observe a swap of thousands of DAI for another asset, this will surely impact prices. If we then perform a transaction and pay a higher fee so that our transaction is mined before the swap, then we can benefit from that prioritized action.

  4. scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu
    1. A DAO is a blockchain-based system thatenables people to coordinate and govern themselvesmediated by a set of self-executing rules deployed ona public blockchain, and whose governance isdecentralized (i.e., independent from centralcontrol).

      the latest definition

    2. According to Cuende, “A DAO is an internet-native entity with no central management which isregulated by a set of automatically enforceable ruleson a public blockchain, and whose goal is to take a lifeof its own and incentivize people to achieve a sharedmission.

      Great definition of a DAO

  5. eprint.iacr.org eprint.iacr.org
    1. Denial of Service

      SC can be taken offline forever. gas limit breach.

      An attacker sees a potential attack and calls the function, directing all the contract's funds to its admins. This destroys the promise of escrow and blocks all the pending bid

    1. Blockchain technology suffers from several cybersecurity vulnerabilities

      Client side: private key, hash function, mining malware, software

      Consensus mechanism: sybil attack, al. history attack, finney attack

      Mining pool: BWH attack, Bribery

      Network: Ty Malleability attack

      Smart contract: solidity, EVM ,Bytecode

    Annotators

    1. Our findings indicate that vault management has improveda lot over the observation period, which we consider acornerstone of Maker’s resilience to stress situations likeBlack Thursday.

      improved vault management over the study periodž

    2. While the events ofMarch 2020 were unfortunate for several users, the resilienceat protocol level proved to be good even under stress.

      Stress resilience for MakerDAO is, despite the black swan event, good.

    1. Oracle-governance attacks in Maker

      Dishonest MKR holders have at their disposal two attack vectors.

      A game played between stablecoin, CDP, and MKR holders (and also potentially miners)

      One of the main things is that the price is calculated by taking the MEDIAN of several Oracles, so no one Oracle can significantly upset the value - it would require many Oracles to be compromised. They were also talking about having a 1 hour delay on prices from oracles in MCD which would allow for an emergency vote to be taken if an attack was occurring.

    2. Whether intentional or not, Maker’s solution to these issues has been to centralize governance ownership and place a trust link to Maker (though it may not necessarily be invoked unless presented with a serious threat).

      Centralized governance pressuposes bening rulers

    3. large acquisition would have a market squeeze effect and may be difficult if many MKR holders are honest, long-term hodlers.

      honest MKR holders can be suspicious of a large acquisition so this can result in market squeeze. However, the attackers will have to spread ther acquisitions over a long period.

    4. The attack could potentially be successful with much less, however. For instance, voter participation is typically very low, the network can be clogged so that honest participants have little chance to react, and dishonest MKR holders could collude with miners to censor voting and CDP collateral transactions. Another added complexity is that MKR is burned when closing a CDP. Thus an attacker in the MKR→Dai Exit Attack could seem to attack the oracle with <50% of MKR and, once the CDP holders start closing the CDPs, actually gain the full 50%.

      can be lower than 51%

      low voter participation clogged network colusion with miners to censor voting and CDP collateral tx

      when cdp is closed the MKR is burned, therefore an attacker could potentiall - through time - gain full 50%

    5. trusted oracles

      An oracle is a mechanism to aggregate and broadcast data from external off-chain sources onto the blockchain. For a stablecoin, the oracle is used to approximate the fair value of the underlying collateral asset in order to guarantee collateralization and thereby the stability of the stablecoin through time.

    6. o maintain security, MKR value needs to grow substantially faster than Dai and collateral supplies. Dai and CDP holders need to bid up these prices for their security. Essentially, stable asset holders need to hold significant positions in a very risky asset in order to secure their stable position, which may defeat the purpose of the stablecoin.

      Let's see the articulation of this vague protoargument.

    7. Either the market doesn’t realize that the potential for MKR governance attacks should lead to a lower bound on pricing, or the market is saying that MKR would be worth more if it were fully decentralized.

      This dillema is interesting. So, because because MRK in 2019 was not sufficiently decentralized, i.e., security of DAI relied on a blind trustlink to tke Maker Foundation, the market EITHER does not realize that since there is the possibility of low friction attacks that MRK should be priced much lower OR that MKR when fully decent would be worth more.

      Now here is one issue - How can MKR have a centralized tendecy and at the same time be open to potential gov attacks. Gov attack vectors emerge from expansive and not centralize gov.

    1. The malicious party could elect a completely new set of external pricefeeds to compute the reference price of collateral asset, since it is calculated as the median pricefeed. Inside the MakerDao V2 median contract, for example, if a malicious entity can changethe bar parameter that represents the size of the quorum, or if the attacker can successfullypermission a new set of price feeds to replace the existing quorum, they could skew the value ofthe reference price. This would cause the Oracle to use an incorrect price Poracle to determine thevalue of CDPs and thereby the supply of Dai in circulation, destabilizing the stablecoin from itspar value to the dollar. Even if the market stabilized and the system recovered from this attack,during the period when Dai was de-pegged, the attacker can take profits through price arbitragesimilar to the Synthetix oracle attack that had occurred

      MakerDao v2 median contract

    Annotators

    1. Maker Governance moved fast to vote in Debt Auction parameter fixes and changes and additions to the system. The community quickly launched further analytic tools, allowing observers to better follow system fixes and changes. See the changelog.  The zero-bid events of March 12-13 led to a collateral auction shortfall amounting to approximately 5.4M+ Dai. Around 1,200 Maker Vaults became under-collateralized and were subsequently liquidated. As noted above, the Maker community is currently discussing the circumstances surrounding the zero bids and resulting liquidations

      How Maker resaponded to the mempool manipulation

    1. MakerDAO liquidations on March 12 and 13

      A company that keeps data on Ethereum mempools around the world, Blocknative, may have an explanation for the "zero-bid" attack on MakerDAO on Black Thursday. Mempools are a holding bin for transactions waiting to get mined into blocks. Under market stress, they tend to get clogged. Blocknative found an endless stream of clever, worthless transactions in mempools on the day of the attack, apparently designed to make it hard for transactions to get through. Falling ETH prices triggered auctions of collateral on MakerDAO. Because the mempools were clogged, bidders could not get bids on those auctions through in many cases, allowing attackers to win ETH collateral with bids worth $0. The attackers walked away with $8.3 million

    1. Projects must strike a balance

      DAO governance is on a spectrum. There are tradeoffs between expansive governance and its security. Attack barriers have colateral effects in also increasing benign user's friction in gov participation.

    2. so almost paradoxically, projects might want to reduce liquidity for the sake of protecting governance.

      the same reversal can be found in the decreasing the value of an attack approach: incentives for an attack are aligned with the DAO success.

    3. In one prominent example, Steemit, a startup building a decentralized social network on their blockchain, Steem, had an on-chain governance system controlled by 20 witnesses. Voters used their STEEM tokens (the platform’s native currency) to choose the witnesses. While Steemit and Steem were gaining traction, Justin Sun had developed plans to merge Steem into Tron, a blockchain protocol he had founded in 2018. To acquire the voting power to do so, Sun approached one of the founders of Steem and bought tokens equivalent to 30 percent of the total supply. Once the then-current Steem witnesses discovered his purchase, they froze Sun’s tokens. What followed was a public back-and-forth between Sun and Steem to control enough tokens to install their preferred slate of top 20 witnesses. After involving major exchanges and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on tokens, Sun was eventually victorious and effectively had free reign over the network. 

      example of an in-protocol attack