Toronto Ethereum UpdateToronto Ethereum Meetup

January 7, 2014

Overview

• Ethereum Bug Bounty Program

• Ethereum Security Audit

• Developer Website - EthDev.com

• Whisper Update

• Mining Update – Dagger Hashimoto

Ethereum Bug Bounty Program• Open to everyone

• Goal: Eliminate bugs in protocols, clients, and network code

• 11 figure satoshi rewards

• Leaderboard listing top contributors by total hunting score

• Other ideas for rewards to be announced shortly

• Detailed submission guidelines, rules and other info will soon be published on www.ethdev.com

Ethereum Security Audit

• Ethereum must undergo and pass an independent full industry-standard security audit prior to genesis block creation

• A large-scale stress test network is to be instituted for testing against a range of real-life adverse situations

• Participants: Established software security firms, academics, blockchain research firms, and companies interested in utilizing Ethereum.

Ethereum Security Audit

• 1000s of individually remote-controllable nodes to be run and tested

• Example scenarios simulated: Simulate ISP attacks, net splits, rogue clients, arrival and departure of large amounts of hash-power

• Example of metrics collected: block & transaction propagation times and patterns, uncle rates and fork lengths

• More information to be released on www.ethdev.com

On Internal Testing

• Dr. Gavin Wood states Ethereum is robust because:• “it is unambiguously formally defined, allowing a highly tractable analysis, saturation tests and

formal auditing of implementations;

• it has an extensive, and ultimately complete, set of tests for providing an exceptionally high degree of likelihood a particular implementation is conformant;

• modern software development practices are observed including a CI system, internal unit tests, strict peer-reviewing, a strict no-warnings policy and automated code analysers;

• its mesh/p2p backend (aka libp2p) is built on well-tested secure foundations (technology stemming from the Kademlia project)”

Developer Website - ethdev.com

• Website to support Developers creating Dapps on Ethereum Platform

• Dev Tutorials

• Dev Documentation

• Download the latest binaries

Tools for Developers• Smart Contracts are to be solely written in Solidity; a custom-designed

contract-oriented language

• Contract creation supported by a secure natural language contract specification format, “SecDoc”

• Ethereum will be releasing formal help documentation for coding contracts

• Ethereum releasing Support Dapps including: Registration, Reputation, Web-of-Trust and more.

• Developer created Dapps can call services from Support Dapps

Whisper Update

• Whisper is a decentralized p2p identity-based messaging protocol

• Allows Dapps to call Whisper API for decentralized communications

• Whisper API is now “reasonably robust and fixed”

• Whisper is “largely ready to prototype applications on”

Mining Update – Dagger Hashimoto

• Currently the leading consensus algorithm for Ethereum 1.0

• Features: ASIC resistant, Light Client Verifiable, Full Chain Storage

• Combines mining algorithms Hashimoto by Thaddeus Dryja and Dagger by Vitalik Buterin

Dagger Hashimoto• ASIC resistant - Reading from memory (RAM) I/O operations is used as

the limiting factor in the mining process instead of computer power

• ASIC resistant - Memory-hard computation but memory-easy validation

• Light Client Verifiable - Light clients are supported but mining rewards are only provided to clients running a full node

• Full Chain Storage - Those running a full client get mining rewards. This Incentivizes the running of full nodes

• ASIC resistance and a mix of Full Node and Light clients results in a highly decentralized network

How to get involved• www.ethereum.org

• Ethereum Forums

• Reddit Community r/ethereum

• Twitter @ethereumproject

• IRC #ethereum and #ethereum-dev

• Join the Toronto Ethereum Meetup Group (Search “Toronto Ethereum”)