An unexpected bug found in an audited smart contract led Virtuals Protocol, a blockchain firm focused on artificial intelligence agents, to issue a timely fix and relaunch its bug bounty program.
On Dec. 3, 2024, pseudonymous security researcher Jinu contacted Virtuals Protocol after discovering a bug in one of its audited contracts. Still, upon reporting the issue, Jinu learned that the company did not have an active bug bounty program, meaning the discovery did not qualify for a reward.
Virtuals Protocol acknowledged the white hat bug discovery. Source: Jinu
White hat hacker reveals vulnerability
According to Jinu, the Virtuals Protocol team also closed the Discord group created solely to report the vulnerability. In an X thread, Jinu said:
“The vulnerability is simple and can impact the virtuals ecosystem (but virtuals probably doesn’t care about security).”
Jinu explained to Cointelegraph that the vulnerability was related to a lack of validation when creating AgentTokens based on the internal bond threshold. “If exploited, this vulnerability would have prevented AgentTokens from being generated until the contract was fixed,” Jinu said.
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After the information was made public on X, Virtuals Protocol contacted Jinu and issued an immediate fix.
Source: Jinu
Virtuals Protocol yet to decide on reward for bug discovery
Despite the timely fix, Virtuals Protocol is yet to announce a bug bounty reward for Jinu. In a message to the researcher, the company thanked Jinu for reporting the issue and apologized for earlier miscommunication.
“Hey jinu we have verified the vulnerability and applied a patch below. Thank you for bringing this up to us and we apologise for the miscommunication between support and yourself. Let us internally review the severity of the issue and we will issue you a bug bounty shortly,” the company representatives told the security researcher.
When asked about the bounty expectations, Jinu said they are unaware of the general rewards for bug discoveries. Jinu told Cointelegraph that they got interested in Virtuals Protocols after a friend invested in a token created on Virtuals.
“I spent about 30 minutes looking at the code to see if it was well done,” Jinu said before they came across the bug.
Cointelegraph has reached out to Virtuals Protocol for comment.
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