Zero to Calc in Six Days: Inside XBOW's Chrome Full Chain
24 points by ollin 4 hours ago | 8 comments
ollin 4 hours ago
This is a technical companion post to https://xbow.com/blog/xbow-built-a-chrome-full-chain-exploit
replywhiplash25 2 hours ago
Anyone else confused with the timeline? Is it actually no bugs to working full chain in 6 days?
reply1. CEO announces goal in January.
2. Team took 2 months on first working full chain.
3. In August, they swap out 1 bug in the chain with a new one, weaponize in 6 days. Weaponization of 1 bug costs $40K in 5.6 sol token spend.
Is that it?
moyix 2 hours ago
No, the first working full chain was entirely invalidated and they fixed all the bugs involved in that chain. So we had to start from scratch at the beginning of August and both found the vulns and built the exploit in 6 days, for $40k. We actually found ~11 vulns throughout those 6 days; we submitted three as a full chain, the middle stage collided, and we submitted one of the backups as a replacement for that stage.
replyEdit: the other piece that I think isn't mentioned is that after Oege gave us the challenge of getting the full chain we didn't actually have a team hired and working on it until around May!
whiplash25 2 hours ago
Nice! So with what you guys have already built, the 4 of you working full-time can crank out 1 working Chrome full-chain a week for under $50K in token spend?
reply
* Kind of on-topic given the last sentence of the article...