The Ethereum Foundation announced last month the launch of the "Trillion Dollar Security (1TS)" initiative, aimed at ensuring Ethereum can support billions of users safely holding over $1 trillion in on-chain assets, and allowing enterprises, institutions, and governments to confidently store and trade values exceeding $1 trillion in a single smart contract or application, promoting Ethereum as a "civilization-level infrastructure" for the global economy.
Just yesterday (10th), the Ethereum Foundation posted on the X platform, officially releasing the first report of this initiative, "Security Challenges Overview". This report outlined six key security challenges in the Ethereum ecosystem and laid the groundwork for solving priority issues. The report's publication marks a significant step for Ethereum in pursuing higher security standards.
Detailed Analysis of Six Security Challenges for ETH
According to the "Security Challenges Overview" report, the Ethereum Foundation, based on extensive feedback from users, developers, security experts, and institutions, identified the following six key challenge areas:
1. User Experience (UX)
The interface for user interaction with Ethereum is a core source of security challenges, where the atomic nature of transactions can lead to significant losses from a single error.
1.1 Private Key Management: Users find it difficult to securely manage private keys, with software wallet seed phrases easily stored insecurely, and hardware wallets facing risks of loss, damage, or supply chain attacks. Enterprise users face additional challenges due to personnel changes and compliance requirements.
1.2 Blind Signing and Transaction Uncertainty: Users often blindly approve transactions due to unclear wallet data, making them vulnerable to malicious contracts, phishing, fraud, or front-end attacks.
1.3 Approval and Permission Management: Wallets default to unlimited, indefinite approvals without permission management features, increasing the risk of malicious applications draining funds.
1.4 Compromised Web Interfaces: Web interfaces are susceptible to DNS hijacking, malicious JavaScript injection, leading users to malicious contracts or misleading transaction signatures.
1.5 Privacy: Weak privacy protection exposes users to phishing, fraud, or physical attacks. Institutional users require stronger privacy protection for compliance or business needs.
1.6 Fragmentation: Lack of consistency across different wallets in transaction display and approval processing increases user learning difficulty and security risks.
2. Smart Contract Security
Smart contracts, due to their transparency, become the primary attack surface, with vulnerabilities and development challenges persisting despite advances in audits and tools.
2.1 Contract Vulnerabilities: Including upgrade risks, re-entrancy attacks, unaudited components, access control failures, cross-chain protocol complexity, and new risks from AI code generation.
2.2 Developer Experience, Tools, and Programming Language: Lack of security defaults, uneven test coverage, low formal verification adoption, compiler defects, and language limitations increase the difficulty of deploying secure contracts.
2.3 On-chain Code Risk Assessment: Existing risk assessment frameworks are difficult to apply to smart contracts, with institutional users struggling to manage risks due to assumptions of code mutability and centralized control.
3. Infrastructure and Cloud Security
The infrastructure supporting Ethereum (such as L2 chains, RPC, cloud services) forms attack surfaces, with centralization increasing risks of interruption and censorship.
3.1 Layer 2 Chains: Complexity of L2 asset bridging, proof system errors, and security committee collusion risks can lead to fund loss or asset freezing.
3.2 RPC and Node Infrastructure: Reliance on few RPC and cloud providers can block user access if they go offline or censor.
3.3 DNS-level Vulnerabilities: DNS hijacking, domain seizures, and phishing similar domains threaten user access security.
3.4 Software Supply Chain and Libraries: Open-source libraries are vulnerable to malicious package injection or dependency hijacking, becoming attack vectors.
3.5 Front-end Delivery Services and Related Risks: CDN and cloud hosting platforms, if attacked, may provide malicious front-ends affecting user security.
3.6 Internet Service Provider Level Censorship: ISPs or countries can censor Ethereum access through traffic blocking, DNS filtering, etc.
4. Consensus Protocol
Ethereum's consensus protocol is stable, but long-term risks need improvement to enhance resilience.
4.1 Consensus Vulnerability and Recovery Risks: Edge cases (such as validator disagreements or network partitions) may lead to consensus stagnation or validator fund losses.
4.2 Client Diversity: Client diversity protects the network, but low adoption rates of minority clients need further improvement.
4.3 Staking Centralization and Pool Dominance: Liquid staking protocols and concentration of large operators may lead to governance capture or homogenization risks.
4.4 Undefined Social Slashing and Coordination Gaps: Lack of clear mechanisms to handle malicious validators, and social slashing processes are not yet mature.
4.5 Economic and Game Theory Attack Vectors: Economic attacks such as slashing attacks, strategic exits, MEV manipulation are not yet fully studied.
4.6 Quantum Risks: Quantum computing may break existing cryptographic technologies, requiring proactive quantum-resistant design.
5. Monitoring, Event Response, and Mitigation
Security vulnerabilities need effective monitoring and response, but existing challenges limit efficiency.
- Contacting Affected Teams: Difficulty in reaching attacked teams, delaying fund recovery.
- Issue Escalation: Cross-organizational coordination is challenging, lacking pre-established contacts.
- Response Coordination: Multiple team assistance can lead to confusion, reducing efficiency.
- Insufficient Monitoring Capabilities: Inadequate on-chain and off-chain monitoring, making early warning difficult.
- Insurance Access: Crypto ecosystem lacks traditional insurance options, making loss mitigation challenging.
6. Social Layer and Governance
Ethereum's community and governance face long-term risks that impact overall security.
6.1 Staking Centralization: Concentrated staking may lead to governance capture, affecting forks or transaction censorship.
6.2 Off-chain Asset Centralization: Off-chain asset holders may influence protocol direction, such as choosing to support specific forks.
6.3 Regulatory Attacks or Pressure: Governments or regulators may force key entities to censor or intervene in the protocol.
6.4 Organizational Governance Capture: Corporate acquisitions or funding dependencies may alter governance culture, weakening Ethereum's neutrality.
Next Steps and Community Engagement
The Ethereum Foundation stated that the next step of the 1TS project is to select the highest priority issues based on the report results and collaborate with the ecosystem to develop solutions. To achieve the "trillion-dollar security" goal, the Ethereum Foundation calls for broad community participation, encouraging users, developers, and institutions to submit feedback through trilliondollarsecurity@ethereum.org, sharing uncovered issues, priority suggestions, or solutions.
