Axelar Network (@axelar): What a $290M exploit teaches us about bridge security.

What a $290M exploit teaches us about bridge security. The $290M exploit that hit the ecosystem over the weekend has caused real harm, not just to users who lost funds and to the affected protocols, but also to the credibility of DeFi and web3 as a whole. The attack was evidently meticulously planned and well executed. But the conditions that made it possible were created long before the attacker showed up. There were multiple points of concern here: First, the bridge was shipped with a single operator configuration, creating a point of centralization, and this configuration was the documented default. Second, that operator was the bridge operator themselves. Third, the operator/RPCs were compromised, indicating operational security shortcomings. +Lastly, the post-mortem report lacks details on how this compromise took place, deflecting accountability. This incident could have been avoided with the adoption of security best practices. Downstream protocols cannot be expected to invent the correct security assumptions on their own nor operate their own validators. That is the job of the bridge. 1) Defining security assumptions, 2) selecting and training validators, 3) ensuring technical competence are all the responsibility of the bridge protocol to prevent compromise; and responding to incidents with public accountability and transparency. The framework for getting this right is well understood. Adapting web3 best practices means a sufficiently decentralized validator set requires operators that are multiple, geographically dispersed, running across different cloud providers, different hardware, different software, and ultimately operating in different jurisdictions. And we must not forget standard operational security processes we know from the web2 era: secure-by-default, defense-in-depth, and proper post mortems. It is high time we raise the standard as an ecosystem.