Cardano Foundation Offers Up to $10,000 in Rewards for Hackers Who Find ADA Vulnerabilities

The Cardano Foundation is launching a ‘Bug Bounty’ program that offers hackers rewards for finding any weaknesses in the smart contract platform’s blockchain.

In a blog post, the Swiss-based, Cardano-focused non-profit says that they’re teaming up with HackerOne, a vulnerability management firm that uses hackers to expose cyber security flaws.

“Over the coming months, together with the Cardano Foundation, our joint Bug Bounty program will use the power of HackerOne’s ethical hackers and diligent procedures to help us ensure that the Cardano blockchain is the most stable and secure blockchain possible. The Cardano codebase will be tested for any performance bugs found which represent a critical vulnerability or potential exploit to core Cardano components. Through a bug bounty program, ethical hackers are incentivized to find vulnerabilities and responsibly report them so they can be fixed before serious damage is done.”

According to the program’s page on HackerOne, rewards for exposing each vulnerability in Cardano range from $300 to $10,000 depending on the severity of the issue.

The Cardano Foundation says that human “ethical hackers” are superior to finding flaws in blockchains compared to automated vulnerability scanners.

“No organization is immune to security vulnerabilities. The only solution is to find and fix them before they are exploited by cybercriminals. Ethical hackers can find vulnerabilities that automated scanners miss, by thinking creatively and identifying places where bugs could be ‘chained’ together to provide an exploit.”

The stress-testing of its network comes as Cardano enters the “final, critical stage” of its smart contract rollout, according to Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK).

IOHK says they’re targeting September 12th to officially upgrade the Cardano blockchain for smart contract functionality.

“Over the days ahead, we’ll be doing final checks and testing within a controlled environment to ensure that we are ready to upgrade the main Cardano network. And usher in a transformative era of smart contracts capability.”