Modularity - Unbundling The Security Stack
Figure 1: Warden Protocol's modular approach unbundles the application layer for greater security
Web3 will not onboard billions of users unless we rethink and unbundle the security stack.
Shared protocol security entails applications on a given infrastructure adhering to the infrastructure’s security requirements, like L2 solutions. These monolithic systems impose equal security on their applications. A vulnerability on a monolithic protocol suddenly doesn’t affect a single application, but depending on the type of bug, it can impact several, leaving developers and users with no means of recourse or correctional mechanism.
In contrast, isolated security allows each application to define its own security. This is sometimes seen on apps built on messaging protocols, like LayerZero. Each application developer defines its own relayer, oracle and validation libraries alongside a set of other security configurations. Each user has to separately validate the risk inclined with every application they want to use. It also assumes developers are trusted, reliable and honest third-parties.
Warden Protocol distinguishes between application, and protocol-level security. Each OApp inherits protocol security from Warden Protocol. The protocol acts as a security aggregator and stabilizing force for the OApp ecosystem. Security guarantees include its replicated, permissionless proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, the fault-tolerant and liveness properties of consensus, the validator set and node authentication, its secure channel communication, fork detection and handling, as well as its finality and censorship resistance. OApp developers retain network effects, and they don’t have to bootstrap new validators for nascent applications. They don’t incur the overhead of having to operate their own infrastructure, they have a lower security budget and are less susceptible to sybil-, long-range, eclipse or 51% attacks which will all contribute to lowering the barriers to new deployment. Each OApp is collectively secured by all the WARD staked on Warden Protocol.
Additionally, OApps inherit application-level security from keychains, and their Intent Engines. This is critical, because the application layer is closest to users, and represents the largest attack vector. With keychains and the Intent Engine, OApp users can configure distributed key creation, signatures, threshold signature schemes, role-based access controls and administrate signing authorization. This creates resilience against private key exploits, theft, spoofing and sweeping.
Thanks to this modularity, OApps can support the same application deployed with different security models, achieving homogeneous protocol security with heterogeneous, isolated application security. Users can choose their trust assumption, while application developers retain the network effects of being able to use the same shared protocol security without incurring security fragmentation when scaling the number of applications. In addition, they stay responsive when new security technologies emerge.