Introducing the Exponent Bug Bounty Program in Collaboration with Immunefi

5 min readJan 18, 2022

Exponent is offering a Bug Bounty program worth up to $25,000 for ethical developers and hackers to identify vulnerabilities within the protocol. For this bounty, we are collaborating with Immunefi, one of the most renowned bug bounty platforms with an extensive track record in helping secure Web3 protocols.

This blog post will provide details on the bug bounty, highlighting the risks Exponent is trying to address, as well as the scope and rewards.

Complete details for the Bug Bounty Program can be found here: https://immunefi.com/bounty/exponent/

About Immunefi

Immunefi is one of the most renowned bug bounty platforms in Web3. The platform incentivizes ethical hackers and security analysts to identify a project’s vulnerabilities and potential solutions in exchange for massive rewards. The Immunefi team are leaders in blockchain-related bug bounties and has an enviable team of security experts.

The platform has prevented over $20 billion in hack damage and is currently protecting over $100 billion in user funds. Ehthical hackers have been reward with over $10 million in payouts. There is currently $81,030,092 in bounties available on the platform.

With Immunefi, whitehat hackers can review code, submit bugs, and get paid. Meanwhile, projects will have their code reviewed by more individuals, helping identify vulnerabilities and improving the security of their code. Leading Web3 projects have collaborated with ImmuneFi including Enzyme Finance, Synthetix, SushiSwap, Nexus Mutual, and ChainLink

About Exponent

Exponent is a decentralized Capital-as-a-Service (CaaS) protocol. The protocol equips decentralized application (dApp) developers with the tools and services to offload and streamline capital management through smart contracts. Three main components make up the protocol

Vault — a one-stop capital management infrastructure
Middleware — application-specific logic and strategies
Strategy generation — return generation and volatility managed DeFi products

Why Have a Bug Bounty Program?

We believe bug bounties, in addition to audits, help make protocols more robust and secure. By setting up bounties, the code reviewing community is incentivized to review code, and help identify vulnerabilities, improving both contract and dApp security.

The Exponent Bug Bounty Program

This Bug Bounty program focuses on the Vault module, which is currently in beta. Multiple components make up the vault:

Ex-ETH — ERC20 tokens representing shares of the vault
XPN Main — the contract with core business logics
Issuance — the contract that streamlines and batch deposits capital into the Exponent vault

At the moment, the XPNSignal contract is not being utilized . The Exponent set of contracts is developed on top of Enzyme Finance’s infrastructure.

Scope of the Bug Bounty Program

The following vulnerabilities are considered and accepted within the parameters of the bug bounty program:

Smart Contracts and Blockchain

Loss of user funds staked (principal) by freezing or theft
Temporary freezing of funds for a minimum of 12 hours
Unable to call smart contract
Denial of Service attacks

Web/ App

Leak of user data
Redirected funds by address modification
Users spoofing other users
Injection of text

What is Out-of-Scope?

The following vulnerabilities are excluded from the rewards for this bug bounty program:

Attacks that the reporter has already exploited themselves, leading to damage
Attacks requiring access to leaked keys/credentials
Attacks requiring access to privileged addresses (governance, strategist)

Smart Contracts and Blockchain

Incorrect data supplied by third party oracles
Not to exclude oracle manipulation/flash loan attacks
Basic economic governance attacks (e.g. 51% attack)
Lack of liquidity
Best practice critiques
Sybil attacks
Centralization risks
Trusting trust/dependency vulnerabilities
Oracle failure/manipulation
Congestion and scalability
Consensus failures
Cryptography problems

Websites and Apps

Theoretical vulnerabilities without any proof or demonstration
Content spoofing / Text injection issues
Self-XSS
Captcha bypass using OCR
CSRF with no security impact (logout CSRF, change language, etc.)
Missing HTTP Security Headers (such as X-FRAME-OPTIONS) or cookie security flags (such as “httponly”)
Server-side information disclosure such as IPs, server names, and most stack traces
Vulnerabilities used to enumerate or confirm the existence of users or tenants
Vulnerabilities requiring unlikely user actions
URL Redirects (unless combined with another vulnerability to produce a more severe vulnerability)
Lack of SSL/TLS best practices
DDoS vulnerabilities
Attacks requiring privileged access from within the organization
Feature requests
Best practices

The following vulnerabilities are also considered out-of-scope:

Known issues found and shared at https://docs.exponent.cx/
Vulnerabilities marked in the Quantstamp security review are not eligible for a reward.

Rewards

Ethical Developers and hackers will get rewarded based on the impact of the detected bug in accordance with Immunefi’s Vulnerability Severity Classification System. We are currently offering bug bounties for critical and high level vulnerabilities:

Smart Contracts and Blockchain

Critical: $25,000
High: $2,500

Web/App

Critical: $2,500
High: $1,000

The Exponent team will be handling payments directly. Rewards are denominated in USD, but will be done in USDC.

Submitting Bug Reports

All High and Critical Smart Contract bug reports require a PoC to be eligible for a reward.

All web/app bug reports must come with a PoC with an end-effect impacting an asset-in-scope in order to be considered for a reward.

What Ethical Hackers Cannot Do

The following activities are prohibited by this bug bounty program:

Any testing with mainnet or public testnet contracts; all testing should be done on private testnets
Any testing with pricing oracles or third party smart contracts
Attempting phishing or other social engineering attacks against our employees and/or customers
Any testing with third party systems and applications (e.g. browser extensions) as well as websites (e.g. SSO providers, advertising networks)
Any denial of service attacks
Automated testing of services that generates significant amounts of traffic
Public disclosure of an unpatched vulnerability in an embargoed bounty

How to Register for the Bug Bounty Program

We currently do not require ethical developers and hackers to KYC to participate in the Bug Bounty program. You can learn about participating in the bug bounty by visiting bugs.immunefi.com

Want to learn more about how you can contribute to Exponent?

Visit our Website: https://www.exponent.cx/

Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/43jv3UKUeK

Email us: contact@exponent.ai