Posts tagged validator security.
How close can an attacker get to your validator? We built a tool to find out
Most validator threat models assume an attacker can't co-locate with your node. We built a tool to measure the real number. It walked a cloud instance from 90ms to 40 microseconds for under a cent.
Anyone can knock a validator over once. The skill is designing an attack you can learn from
Making a node fall over is easy and proves nothing. The craft is building a reproducer that isolates the mechanism, measures it against an honest baseline, bounds the cost, and runs on one command, so the number actually means something.
Expensive work before authentication: the RPC pattern we keep finding
The DoS class that scales against validators isn't volumetric. It's small requests that cost the node real work before it authenticates the caller. The pattern we keep finding across clients, and the fix.
We're securing validators at the wrong layer
Blockchain security money goes to smart-contract audits. The validators those contracts run on are defended for volume and almost nothing else. The attacks that actually scale live at the transport and RPC layer, and they're a class, not a list.
Open data for blockchain validator security: the first multi-modal dataset for infrastructure attacks
We've published nr-bundles-public on Hugging Face: the first open, multi-modal dataset for blockchain validator security. 31 schema-pinned observations across Sui and Solana, seven attack families, CC-BY-4.0. Open bundle format, open ten-family taxonomy, closed corpus. The substrate for cross-chain ML detection of infrastructure attacks.