Ethereum Classic Labs & Gitcoin Network Security Hackathon

Hackathon Details 

Improvements to the GHOST Protocol

Team're curious to hear about what you think is possible when you explore the tradeoffs between:

• Consistency
• Finality
• Availability
• Partition Tolerance

If you were to make extensions to, assumptions and modifications to the GHOST protocol, a new economic mechanism(s), or create an external system; how would you leverage the changes to make PoW blockchains better?

In particular, team are interested in detection, analytics, and deterrence tools and systems and are looking for a request for proposal (RFP) for a research topic you'd like to explore that would move things forward.

Timeline 

Phase 1: RFP-athon

Timeframe:

• RFP-athon: Nov 2 – Nov 20 2020
• Q&A Webinar: TBD
• Proposals due: Nov 20, 2020

Phase 2: Hackathon

Implement winning RFP’s in the most effective and efficient way.

Timeframe:

• Hackathon: Dec 7, 2020 - Jan 11, 2021
• Webinar: TBD
• Hackathon ends: Jan 11, 2021
• Winners announced: Jan 25, 2021

Prizes 

Phase 1: The best proposal ideas will receive ETC, ETH or Cash and an invitation to hackathon phase II.

• 1st Place - $2,000
• 2nd Place - $1,000
• 3rd Place - $500

Phase 2:

• 1st Place - up to $50,000
• 2nd Place – up to $20,000
• 3rd Place – up to $5,000

Bounties 

Designing systems and tools that will make 51% attacks less harmful and harder to execute. This includes ghostwriting tools to support the detection, provide analytics, and deterrence of adversarial network participants.

1. Early Warning 51% Detection System

Summary:

51% attacks are difficult to detect in PoW systems let alone forecast. Team are looking for tools that can be used to provide a warning about future 51% attacks. Examples might be but not limited to systems that are used to detect offline mining, abnormal mining pool behavior, etc. These tools might be systems or algorithms that can be implemented to warn about potential 51% attacks.

Acceptance Criteria:

A quantifiable metric or set of metrics on which to predict that an attack may happen, visualization of a potential attack scenario and detection scenario, a specification of how the algorithms/systems can be implemented.

2. Create Systems to Deter Adversarial Network Participants

Summary:

Team are looking for systems that help deter adversarial network participants from being potential bad actors on the network. For this proposal, team’d like to see algorithms, and schemes that can help encourage better network participation and discourage network manipulation. One example of an idea would be proposal that have a scope similar to this deterrence of selfish mining paper. http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcFC.pdf

Acceptance Criteria:

Team’d like to see a brief white paper of a proposal for ETC that demonstrates a quantifiable

improvement in deterring bad network behavior, whether it’s improved block times, reduced chain bloat, reduced spam or any behavioral metric of your choosing. Ideally, they’d like the paper to include the following. Implementable description of the algorithm and system, as well as metrics on how the algorithm deters adversarial behavior

3. Open Track Bounty

Summary:

team are looking for you to propose a feature for ETC, that would result in an improved network for network participants, particularly on a security front. These can vary wildly and they would like to see what aspects you could improve. For example, network block propagation, Kademlia improvements, state management improvements, block sealing ethash improvement analysis, fundamentally improving network connectivity, are only tangentially related to security, but can result in an improvement.

Acceptance Criteria:

Team'd like to see a white paper of a proposal specifically for ETC that states clearly what aspect of ETC you’d like to improve, how it will affect security, and a clear description of how to implement the improvement.

Proposal process 

Ethereum Classic Labs is seeking proposals for the following RFPs above. The deadline for proposals is

Nov 20th, 2020 at 23:59 PDT for priority consideration.

Overall theme: Designing systems that will make 51% attacks less harmful and harder to execute by creating early warning tools and systems.

Proposals should include:

1.   Project Description

• Brief description
• Value to the Ethereum Classic ecosystem

2.   Deliverables

• An explanation of your technical solution and architecture
• Imagine that an experienced software developer will evaluate your proposal

3.   Milestones & Funding requested

• Most projects have at least 4 milestones
• Budget and estimated timeframe for each milestone

4.   Team

• Roles and Experience
• Teams with a history of high-quality open source code repos and live applications and products are preferred.

Proposal Requirements:

Proposals should include a value proposition about how it will benefit the Ethereum Classic ecosystem, technical detail about what your team intends to build and evidence your team is capable of creating good, re-usable open source code, compelling product demos and great documentation, and a reasonable technical development plan broken down into milestones.

Evaluation of proposals based on:

• The quality of the proposal and near-term value to the Ethereum Classic ecosystem
• Your team’s technical experience, open source contributions and interest in diving into security issues on blockchain and specifically ETC.
• Likelihood that your team will continue to support the Ethereum Classic ecosystem long-term and commitment to maintaining your project for one year