News
Crypto security firm Ironblocks creates a “firewall” for DeFi protocols
-
Blockchain security platform Ironblocks has a new tool for DeFi developers who want to add security to their smart contracts.
-
At launch, the service has three large users: the zkEVM Linea chain, AltLayer, and the Kinto layer-2 network – with more on the way.
A cottage industry of crypto security companies watches over the consequences of hacks and protocol heists. Now one of them has come out with a “firewall” aimed at preemptively stopping those thefts.
Blockchain security platform Ironblocks’ new tool is a free service for developers who want to add security to their smart contracts, CEO Or Dadosh told CoinDesk. Called Firewall, it allows them to plug-and-play various security “policies” to monitor transactions on their decentralized financial protocols for suspicious attempts.
The open-source toolkit could offer at least some remedy to the ever-present threat of hacks in DeFi. Dadosh estimates that each week brings with it up to 10 different protocol hacks that offer lending, trading, staking or other financial services to cryptocurrency holders. These robberies add up: PeckShield valued $60 million in losses in April.
The firewall sits within the transactions of smart contract processing protocols, Dadosh said. Developers can choose from a handful of policies that scan the stream for rough patterns and other signs that an attack is underway.
“It doesn’t stop or pause the application, it simply stops the specific transaction that might attack the application, just like in web2 firewalls,” Dadosh said.
At launch, the service has three large users: the zkEVM Linea chain, AltLayer, and the Kinto layer-2 network. Dadosh said more will come.
Because the service is free, it’s not meant to be a direct money generator for Ironblocks, an Israeli startup that raised $7 million in venture funding in early 2023. Instead, it’s a feeder for its other defense products the company’s cryptographic computing, including the upcoming “Venn Security Network,” according to its website. Dadosh was reluctant to discuss what the network would look like.
But the Firewall toolkit could offer a breakthrough for security in an ecosystem where the immutability of code makes incremental updates – a bug here, a potential exploit there – difficult to fix on the go. Dadosh said developers can add more policies to their code after the fact and remove them.
How developers make these changes is up to them. Perhaps they could hand decisions over to the governance communities that hold their projects’ tokens, to a multi-party controlled wallet (a multisig), or to the DAO.
The story continues
The point is to stop hacks before they happen.
“Once you get hacked, in most cases, that’s it,” Dadosh said. “And that’s what we’re trying to prevent.”