HackAtom3 Winners Announced

The votes are in for the Cosmos “HackAtom 3: Validator Series” in both categories, monitoring/alerting and security/operations. Dr. Terry Brugger from Bubowerks joined the panel of judges along with Jack Zampolin, Jessy Irwin, and Zaki Manian from Tendermint.

In preparation for the Game of Stakes and eventual mainnet launch, validators need to expand automation tooling to improve uptime, monitoring, alerting and defense mechanisms. The best setups will range from advanced alerting systems and fallback to deception techniques as part of their security strategy. HackAtom3 was aimed at accelerating the ecosystem of tooling for validators. Judging criteria were the following:

• documentation
• benefit to the validator community
• ease of use
• originality
• completeness

Alerting & Monitoring Category Winners

1st Place: Certus One

The winner, Certus One, designed a tool to deploy a full Cosmos-SDK testnet with monitoring capabilities on an OpenShift Origin/okd.io Kubernetes cluster and alerting from Chain.Explorer. The judges found the tool to be the most comprehensive in this category for validators in terms of completeness and packaging of its operational monitoring solution.

GitHub repo:

• https://github.com/certusone/testnet_deploy
• https://github.com/certusone/chain_exporter

2nd Place: Forbole

The runner-up, Forbole, submitted a two-fold tooling solution for a dynamic push notification of the status of your validator to immediately notify your Telegram or SMS channels (you customize the cadence of alerts). Validators can always be connected to their systems and get up-to-the-minute information on exactly what happened to a specific validator.

GitHub repo:

• https://github.com/forbole/big_dipper
• https://github.com/forbole/gaia_bot_monitor

Security & Operations Category Winners

1st Place: Umbrella Validator

The winner, Umbrella Validator, made a strong submission with a three-tier solution covering operational security architecture focused on deception, patching, and voting. Validators are in the early stages of implementing extensive security hygiene and trickery. The second component was an automation tool called “secure your vote”, used to avoid slashing by automatically generating a default vote response. Lastly, the main piece, the patching component provided automated patching through a general updating tool in Gaia.

GitHub repo:

• https://github.com/gin/2018-hackatom3

2nd Place: Beam

The runner-up, Beam, is a multi-functional tool tied to Amazon Web Services to manage and run a highly available and secure Cosmos Validator behind a dynamic set of sentry nodes for protection. For example, if a sentry is not performing as expected, it is detected and shut down with a new sentry taking its place. Beam is designed to remove the manual processes of running a dynamic architecture for validator operations like:

• Automatic failover
• DDoS Protection via automatic IP changes
• Dynamic gaiad Configuration Management
• Auto-Bonding of Stake
• Governance Proposal Alerts
• Auto-Voting based on timed thresholds
• Infrastructure Health Checks

Beam is still incomplete compared to its full potential and we encourage the creator of Beam and the community to take it there and expand beyond AWS implementation.

GitHub repo:

• https://github.com/gkrizek/beam

A big thank you to all our community members who submitted tooling and to our HackAtom3 judges. In particular, our guest judge and cybersecurity expert, Dr. Terry Brugger from Bubowerks.

Judges

Zaki Manian, Head of Tendermint Labs, advisor to Amino Capitol, and Executive Director of Trusted IoT Alliance. Zaki has deep expertise in cryptography and distributed consensus systems.

Jessy Irwin is Head of Security at Tendermint, where she builds defensive security programs that support and enable the needs of her organization, its people, and their code. She is an internationally recognized keynote speaker and writer who enjoys few things more than discussing security maturity, defense in depth, risk, and security culture.

Dr. Terry Brugger is the founder and Computer Scientist at BuboWerks, a full-scope information security consultancy. He has two decades of information security expertise helping large and small clients across verticals to improve information security programs, operations, code, infrastructure, and capabilities.

Jack Zampolin is a product manager at Tendermint and a product lead for Ethermint, a fast Proof-of-Stake implementation of Ethereum built on top of Tendermint Core with the Cosmos-SDK blockchain framework.