Kaia Protocol: Program info

Kairos Testnet (as well as Kaia Mainnet) is part of Kaia's production infrastructure. It is used by real users and services and must not be targeted for security testing, stress testing, or exploitation attempts.

To avoid service disruption, all vulnerability research and testing must be performed on a local private network only.

For example, set up a local Kaia network using: https://github.com/kaiachain/kaiaspray/tree/main/local-deploy

You can test the system smart contracts on a local fork network: https://docs.kaia.io/build/smart-contracts/deployment-and-verification/deploy/foundry/#forking-mainnet-with-cast-and-anvil

IN SCOPE VULNERABILITIES: Blockchain Protocol

The list is not limited to the following submissions, but it gives an overview of what issues we care about:

• Stealing or loss of funds
• Unauthorized transaction
• Transaction manipulation
• Price manipulation
• Fee payment bypass
• Balance manipulation
• Violation of tokenomics
• Privacy violation
• Cryptographic flaws
• Authentication/authorization bypass
• Consensus safety violation
• State or execution divergence
• Integrity of block/transaction data

OUT OF SCOPE VULNERABILITIES: Blockchain Protocol

• Network-level DoS
• Unused or unoperated components such as ServiceChain or MEV Auction.
• Computation cost and the first-transaction timeout exemption
• Capability a trusted role already has by design
• Governance misconfiguration — authorized actor setting a nonsense value
• Premised on chain reorg or non-final blocks
• No net gain or no realistic incentive to the attacker

• Node config — non-default, undocumented, or testing-only flag; operator exposing admin/debug/subbridge namespaces

Severity

We use HackenProof's Blockchain Protocol vulnerability classification as our reference. The severity listed there for an impact is the maximum severity we will assign to it, not a guaranteed one. We decide the final severity from the actual bug: how hard it is to trigger, which assumptions it needs, how long the impact lasts, and whether it recovers on its own.

For example, "Temporary freezing of network transactions" is listed as High. A report demonstrating that impact will be rated High at most — a bug that stalls the chain only briefly, needs an unrealistic precondition, or self-recovers may be rated Medium, Low, or Informative instead. The same holds in the other direction: we will not rate a report above the classification's level for the impact it actually demonstrates.

• Avoid using web application scanners for automatic vulnerability searching which generates massive traffic
• Make every effort not to damage or restrict the availability of products, services, or infrastructure
• Avoid compromising any personal data, interruption, or degradation of any service
• Don’t access or modify other user data, localize all tests to your accounts
• Perform testing only within the scope
• Don’t exploit any DoS/DDoS vulnerabilities, social engineering attacks, or spam
• Don’t spam forms or account creation flows using automated scanners
• In case you find chain vulnerabilities we’ll pay only for vulnerability with the highest severity
• Don’t break any law and stay in the defined scope
• Any details of found vulnerabilities must not be communicated to anyone who is not a HackenProof Team or an authorized employee of this Company without appropriate permission
• Any issues required a malicious validator are treated as lower severity and will be classified as Medium at most

• Do not discuss this program or any vulnerabilities (even resolved ones) outside of the program without express consent from the organization
• No vulnerability disclosure, including partial is allowed for the moment
• Please do NOT publish/discuss bugs

We are happy to thank everyone who submits valid reports which help us improve the security. However, only those that meet the following eligibility requirements may receive a monetary reward:

• You must be the first reporter of a vulnerability.
• The vulnerability must be a qualifying vulnerability
• Any vulnerability found must be reported no later than 24 hours after discovery and exclusively through hackenproof.com
• You must send a clear textual description of the report along with steps to reproduce the issue, include attachments such as screenshots or proof of concept code as necessary.
• You must not be a former or current employee of us or one of its contractor.
• ONLY USE the EMAIL under which you registered your HackenProof account (in case of violation, no bounty can be awarded)
• Provide detailed but to-the point reproduction steps
• AI-generated reports without runable PoC are not accepted under this program