THORChain

THORChain is a decentralised cross-chain liquidity protocol based on Tendermint & Cosmos-SDK and utilising Threshold Signature Schemes (TSS). It does not peg or wrap assets, it simply determines how to move them in response to user-actions.

THORChain observes incoming user deposits to vaults, executes business logic (swap, add/remove liquidity), and processes outbound transactions. THORChain is primarily a leaderless vault manager, ensuring that every stage of the process is byzantine-fault-tolerant.

THORChain's key objective is to be resistant to centralisation and capture whilst facilitating cross-chain liquidity. THORChain only secures the assets in its vaults, and has economic guarantees that those assets are safe.

For more information about how THORChain works, please visit https://docs.thorchain.org/technology.

The bug bounty program covers its smart contracts and core THORChain functionality, and is focused on receiving critical bug reports covering impacts as stated in the Impacts in Scope section. Vulnerabilities below the Critical severity level are not accepted under the bug bounty program. Nine Realms has joined the efforts to triage and verify vulnerabilities of this bug bounty program.

Rewards are distributed according to the impact of the vulnerability based on the Immunefi Vulnerability Severity Classification System. This is a simplified 5-level scale, with separate scales for websites/apps and smart contracts/blockchains, encompassing everything from consequence of exploitation to privilege required to likelihood of a successful exploit.

THORChain core team members, auditing firms contracted by THORChain, as well as contributors on Treasury payroll are not permitted to participate in this bug bounty program. If an existing pull request or live issue on GitLab addresses the vulnerability reported, it will not be eligible for a reward.

The reward is dependent on the amount of funds that can be taken or permanently frozen per vulnerability exploited over the span of 30 minutes, capped at 10% of the funds that can be taken or permanently frozen, up to USD 300 000. For vulnerabilities that can be exploited and executed in a single non-ongoing attack over a single block, the cap is USD 500 000.

The total pool of the bug bounty program is USD 2 000 000. Rewards are distributed on a first-come-first serve basis. Once this pool is depleted, no further rewards will be paid out until the full redeployment of THORChain in about 8 weeks from the launch date of this bug bounty program. Rewards will only be distributed if it is still relevant to the full redeployment at the discretion of the team. This amount will be updated as the bug bounty program is ongoing.

In order to qualify for the critical reward, a PoC must be included. Exploited vulnerabilities, as well as known issues, are not eligible for a reward.

Payouts are handled by the THORChain treasury in coordination with the THORChain team and are denominated in USD. However, payouts are done completely in RUNE. Triaging and verification for this bug bounty program is provided by Nine Realms.

Bifrost-related vulnerabilities are only considered as in-scope if they affect one of the chains mentioned in the Assets in Scope table. Vulnerabilities that only affect other chains are not considered in-scope.

At this time, ETH-related vulnerabilities are currently only in-scope if funds can be stolen from the router contract without any additional interaction with Bifrost code. This means a Solidity PoC must be submitted containing an exploit that allows funds to be stolen directly from the smart contract, without “tricking” Bifrost into doing anything. The scope of ETH bounties will be expanded to include Bifrost interactions at a later date.

While the Tendermint application (https://gitlab.com/thorchain/thornode/-/tree/develop/app) is considered as in-scope, Cosmos SDK dependencies themselves are out-of-scope.

Impacts in Scope

Only the following impacts are accepted within this bug bounty program. All other impacts are not considered as in-scope, even if they affect something in the assets in scope table.

Smart Contracts and Blockchain

• Loss of user funds (staked/locked) by permanent freezing or theft
• Loss of governance funds

We are especially interested in receiving and rewarding attacks of the following types, as long as they result in the impacts in scope:

Smart Contracts and Blockchain

• Re-entrancy
• Logic errors
  • including user authentication errors
• Solidity/EVM details not considered
  • including integer over-/under-flow
  • including rounding errors
  • including unhandled exceptions
• Trusting trust/dependency vulnerabilities
  • including composability vulnerabilities
• Oracle failure/manipulation
• Novel governance attacks
• Economic/financial attacks
  • including flash loan attacks
• Congestion and scalability
  • including running out of gas
  • including block stuffing
  • including susceptibility to frontrunning
• Cryptography problems
  • Signature malleability
  • Susceptibility to replay attacks
  • Weak randomness
  • Weak encryption
• Susceptibility to block timestamp manipulation
• Missing access controls / unprotected internal or debugging interfaces

The following vulnerabilities are excluded from the rewards for this bug bounty program:

• Attacks that the reporter has already exploited themselves, leading to damage
• Attacks requiring access to leaked keys/credentials
• Attacks requiring access to privileged addresses (governance, strategist)

Smart Contracts and Blockchain

• Incorrect data supplied by third party oracles
  • Not to exclude oracle manipulation/flash loan attacks
• Basic economic governance attacks (e.g. 51% attack)
• Lack of liquidity
• Best practice critiques
• Logic errors
• Congestion and scalability
• Sybil attacks

The following activities are prohibited by the bug bounty program:

• Any testing with mainnet or public testnet contracts; all testing should be done on private testnets
• Any testing with pricing oracles or third party smart contracts
• Attempting phishing or other social engineering attacks against our employees and/or customers
• Any testing with third party systems and applications (e.g. browser extensions) as well as websites (e.g. SSO providers, advertising networks)
• Any denial of service attacks
• Automated testing of services that generates significant amounts of traffic
• Public disclosure of an unpatched vulnerability in an embargoed bounty