Even the best developers make mistakes. In order to gradually eliminate resulting bugs, a good solution is to motivate numerous competent inspectors to search through protocol code and identify weak spots in the code. Such vulnerabilities may be lucrative for blackhat hackers, so it is important to create appropriate incentives for whitehat inspectors to work as thoroughly as possible. Considering the follow-up costs that programing errors can result in, this can often be a very sensible investment.

Bug bounty programs are open to the public for this purpose, in order to acquire as many technically skilled inspectors as possible for a bug hunt. So-called “Full Disclosure” documentation discloses the program bugs completely publicly, while in the “Responsible Disclosure” model, only the originator is informed about the bugs for a limited time to have enough time to solve the problem. Responsible Disclosure is usually utilized when bug concerns a severe vulnerability to a live system which has not yet been exploited by attackers. One such case was the Zcash Counterfeiting bug discovered by the Electric Coin Co. in 2019.

Our partner, Fetch.ai launched a bug bounty program which ran from mid-2019 until the recent migration to the mainnet, which took place on 20 September 2021. There was a public call to inspect the code on Fetch.ai‘s Github ledger repository and report bugs as a Github issue, ranging from critical to low risk level. Depending on the severity of the bug, a reward of up to $10,000 in FET was available.
We mention this because our latest project, MOBIX is deployed to the Fetch.ai blockchain.  In essence we’re able to leverage both the Cosmos SDK and Fetch.ai as a foundation for MOBIX. Due to the bug bounties run by Fetch and by the Interchain Foundation to assure code quality the chances of any kind of problem is significantly minimized.

The post Did you Know: What’s a Bug Bounty Program? appeared first on DATARELLA.

It’s not that simple though. There are actually two sub-categories of cross-chain transactions that need to be differentiated.

1. Homogeneous IBC: transactions across two different operating on the same core protocol.
2. Heterogeneous IBC: transactions across two different chains on different core protocols.

This is really a rabbit hole! What’s a core protocol?  Essentially if two chains share the same core protocol which can natively verify and utilize the state of another blockchain using that core protocol. This is more complex than it appears at first glance.

Homogeneous IBC:
In chains such as Cosmos, all have different security models and do not all share the same consensus mechanism. Despite this, all Cosmos Blockchains are compatible with the inter-blockchain communication protocol which provides “reliable & secure inter-module communication between deterministic processes that running on independent distributed ledgers”. Additionally in chains such as Polkodot there IS a shared security module.  In that case, a relay chain makes it possible for state changes on one Polkodot “parachain” to be ingested by and compatible with another parachain.

Heterogeneous IBC:
Most Blockchain ecosystems that offer Homogeneous IBC between chains operating on the same core protocol also offer some possibility for interacting with external chains that are “economically and technically sovereign”. In the case of Polkodot these chains are called Bridges. The Cosmos ecosystem uses a functionality called the “peg zone” to enable Heterogeneous IBC.

An in-depth discussion of how these functionalities work deserves its own post.

The post Ask Datarella: What is Interblockchain Communication? appeared first on DATARELLA.