The log.
Security notes, post-mortems, and observations from the audit floor.
Groth16 vs PLONK vs STARKs: Security Trade-offs for Protocol Designers
The choice of proof system is a security decision. Trusted setup requirements, cryptographic assumptions, quantum resistance, and verification costs differ materially between Groth16, PLONK, and STARKs.
ERC-4337 Account Abstraction Security: Paymasters, Bundlers, and UserOp Validation
Account abstraction separates validation from execution and introduces Bundlers and Paymasters as new trust boundaries. Each boundary is an attack surface. The ERC-4337 security model requires understanding all of them.
MEV and Front-Running: What an Audit Actually Looks For
Maximal extractable value is not a bug — it is a property of public blockchains. But specific protocol design choices create extraction opportunities that were not intended by the designers. These are the ones auditors flag.
Tokenomics Audit: When the Math Is the Vulnerability
Some vulnerabilities live in the economic design, not the code. An emission schedule that can be front-run, a vesting cliff that can be bypassed, a reflexive design that collapses under selling pressure — these require economic analysis, not just code review.
Trusted Setup Ceremonies: What Can Go Wrong
A compromised trusted setup allows the generation of valid proofs for false statements — silently, undetectably, forever. Understanding what ceremonies actually guarantee is essential for any team building on a setup-dependent proof system.
Airdrop and Merkle Distribution Security: Proof Manipulation and Double Claims
A Merkle distribution looks simple. The root is on-chain, the proofs are off-chain, claims are verified on submission. The attack surfaces are in the leaf encoding, the claim tracking, and the assumptions about who controls the tree.
Aptos Smart Contract Security: Move VM, Resources, and Ownership Model
Move's linear type system prevents entire classes of EVM vulnerabilities at the language level. The vulnerabilities that remain — resource leaks, signer capability abuse, entry function access control — require a different audit approach.
Signature Replay Attacks: Why Off-Chain Signatures Are Hard to Get Right
A valid signature from the right signer, used in the wrong context, is an exploit. Chain ID, nonce, contract address, expiry — every missing component of a signature domain is an attack surface.
Vesting and Cliff Contracts: Time Manipulation and Beneficiary Confusion
Vesting contracts hold significant value for extended periods. Timestamp dependence, beneficiary address management, revocation access control, and interactions with governance systems each create exploitable surfaces.
Sui Security: Object Model, Shared State, and Common Vulnerabilities
Sui's object-centric model eliminates global shared state by default — and introduces new vulnerability classes around object ownership, capability patterns, and shared object contention.