Overview

As a collective effort with University of Pennsylvania and EduDAO to bring real industry-grade security challenges to the education of future blockchain industry practitioners, Secure3 incorporates its new model, Audit Contest, to the coursework of CIS 7000, “Web3.0 Security” by Prof. Mayur Naik at University of Pennsylvania. Special thanks to XCarnival Protocol for allowing top students to participate in their contest.

We are also opening limited spots for EduDAO and its Sub-DAO people participation. Check out the application requirement at the end of the article.

How Everything Works

From 10/31 to 11/21, students from CIS7000 at University of Pennsylvania will participate in one Secure3 Audit Contest on the smart contracts of a real client, XCarnival protocol, together with other students from top universities across the world led by EduDAO, and experienced auditors on Secure3 platform.

As a contest, participants are ranked and rewarded by their audit performance. Secure3 audit contest incentivize auditors who:

• Find more critical bugs
• Find unique bugs that no other auditors find
• Auditors who provide good quality findings with clear hack logic and actionable fix proposals

Participants, according to the final contest ranking, are expected to receive:

1. Extra credit for CIS7000 class
2. Monetary rewards from the audit contest
3. NFT based on ranking and participation

In addition, all valid findings will be aggregated as a final report for everyone to learn from the community.

UPenn’s perspective: teach practically to link students with industry frontline

The University of Pennsylvania pays great attention in education on the concept of blockchain. In CIS 7000, students learn various techniques for program security and how they apply to the Web3.0 domain. The fundamentals of the course have roots in program analysis, testing, and formal verification.

Smart contracts often hold funds and are frequent surfaces of attack. “The cost of a bug in the Web3.0 domain is often massive and difficult to revert. We will teach the foundations of program analysis while getting hands-on experience in finding bugs and verifying correctness of smart contracts.” said Prof. Mayur Naik, the instructor of the course.

“It’s the best time to practice what you’ve learned so far: students are encouraged to use all of the tools they’ve been taught throughout the class to find security and business logic vulnerabilities and give fix suggestions.” said Elizabeth Dinella, head TA of CIS 7000 and CS PhD candidate of UPenn. “And we strongly recommend our students to participate in the contest”.

Secure3 Audit Contest for Education: a propeller to bring more talents to blockchain industry

Secure3 aims to secure Web3 by empowering a transparent, collaborative and verifiable security ecosystem. It provides trustworthy security auditing for projects, competitive incentive model for auditors and whitehats, and verifiable security track record for community.

“In this collective effort, students can immediately see that what they have learned is critical in real-world bug discovery, and as findings from peers are going to be evaluated, aggregated and released at the end of the contest, students learn from their peers and become more professional at coding smart contract securely.” said Alan Xia, CEO of Secure3.

“Failure to discover a bug is disastrous for all parties, including projects, project developers, customers and investors. There are multiple layers to prevent this from happening, including coding securely, coherent business logic design, smart contract auditing, on-chain data monitoring, bug bounty, etc.; yet each layer requires collective efforts and intelligence from the community. We aim to bring more people to the industry through education to fill in the gap.”

Debrief of Serial Collaborations between Secure3 and EduDAO

EduDAO supports the innovators of tomorrow, with their mission to educate students on all things blockchain so they can transform into top crypto talents, or have the confidence to build the next big thing, in which they host events, meetups, hackerhouses, and hackathons for all young talents to learn with each other and progress.

“It will be our very first one of a series of educational collaborations with Secure3, “ said Lina Zhao, head of university relations of EduDAO. “One of our major missions is to host, support and sponsor university projects and events that aim for blockchain education and practice, and we are hereby encouraging members of other schools to participate in this joint contest as well.”

How to Participate

This will be the first of a series of Secure3 Audit Contest for Education, so stay tuned for the new ones!

For a limited time, we are opening limited spots to participate in the audit contest, to be qualified:

1. You need to be alumni of EduDAO’s sub-DAO affiliated universities, including University of California at Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, University of Michigan, MIT, Oxford University, University of Southern California, Tsinghua University.
2. Submit your application here: https://forms.gle/uoRY571XYhRF422NA
3. Application deadline 10/27/2022 midnight PST
4. Selected Participants will be notified by email before contest starts