Skip to content

Grin's Security Process

Grin has a code of conduct and the handling of vulnerability disclosure is no exception. We are committed to conduct our security process in a professional and civil manner. Public shaming, under-reporting or misrepresentation of vulnerabilities will not be tolerated.

Responsible Disclosure Standard

Grin follows a community standard for responsible disclosure in cryptocurrency and related software. This document is a public commitment to following the standard.

This standard provides detailed information for:

  • Initial Contact: how the initial contact process works
  • Giving Details: what details to include with your disclosure after receiving a response to your initial contact
  • Setting Dates: details for when to release updates and publicize details of the issue

Any expected deviations and necessary clarifications around the standard are explained in the following sections.

Receiving Disclosures

We are committed to working with researchers who submit security vulnerability notifications to us, to resolve those issues on an appropriate timeline and perform a coordinated release, giving credit to the reporter if they would like.

Please submit issues to all of the following main points of contact for security related issues according to the initial contact and details guidelines. More information is available about the expected timelines for the full disclosure cycle.

For all security related issues, there are 3 main points of contact:

  • Daniel Lehnberg, daniel.lehnberg at protonmail.com PGP key
  • John Woeltz, joltz at protonmail.com PGP key

Send all communications PGP encrypted to all parties.

Sending Disclosures

In the case where we become aware of security issues affecting other projects that has never affected Grin, our intention is to inform those projects of security issues on a best effort basis.

In the case where we fix a security issue in Grin that also affects the following neighboring projects, our intention is to engage in responsible disclosures with them as described in the adopted standard, subject to the deviations described in the deviations section of this document.

Bilateral Responsible Disclosure Agreements

Grin does not currently have any established bilateral disclosure agreements.

Recognition and Bug Bounties

Grin's responsible disclosure standard includes some general language about Bounty Payments and Acknowledgements.

Grin is a traditional open source project with limited to no direct funding. As such, we have little means with which to compensate security researchers for their contributions. We recognize this is a shame and intend to do our best to still make these worth while by:

  • Advertising the vulnerability, the researchers, or their team on a public page linked from our website, with a links of their choosing.
  • Acting as reference whenever this is needed.
  • Setting up retroactive bounties whenever possible.

There is not currently a formal bug bounty program for Grin as it would require a high level of resources and engagement to operate in good faith. More funding can help provide the necessary resources to run one in the future for the Grin community.

Deviations from the Standard

Grin is a technology that provides strong privacy with zero-knowledge commitments and rangeproofs. Due to the nature of the cryptography used, if a counterfeiting bug results it could be exploited without a way to identify which data was corrupted. This renders rollbacks or other fork-based attempted fixes ineffective.

The standard describes reporters of vulnerabilities including full details of an issue, in order to reproduce it. This is necessary for instance in the case of an external researcher both demonstrating and proving that there really is a security issue, and that security issue really has the impact that they say it has - allowing the development team to accurately prioritize and resolve the issue.

In the case of a counterfeiting or privacy-breaking bug, however, we might decide not to include those details with our reports to partners ahead of coordinated release, so long as we are sure that they are vulnerable.

More Information

Additional security-related information about the Grin project including previous audits, CVEs, canaries, signatures and PGP public keys can be found in the grin-security repository.