Offline cold storage cryptocurrency wallet service provider GK8 is offering a bug bounty of upwards to $250,000 to the first person who tin hack its product.

GK8 — which presents its solution every bit a "hack-proof digital vault" that needs no directly or indirect connectedness to the internet —  volition place 14 Bitcoin (BTC) (over $125,000 at printing time) in its wallet. Anyone who succeeds in breaking into the wallet will pocket its gain, plus an additional $125,000 prize.

The compensation programme will run from February. 3 (nine:00 a.grand EST) through February 4, 2022 (9:00 AM EST).

Mitigating country-sponsored attacks and APT threats

Israel-based GK8 claims its loftier-security custody solution for digital asset storage will allow banks and other institutions to fully admission and manage their crypto holdings and related data without needing to connect to the net.

The firm's site claims the production has been designed so as "to minimize the wallet's assault surface and block attackers' influence on security-critical components."

Among the listing of risks it aims to mitigate, GK8 has pointed to state-sponsored attacks and stealth APT (avant-garde persistent threat) cyber threats.

Zcash (ZEC) founding scientist and cryptography researcher Professor Eran Tromer has endorsed the projection, contending that the cold wallet solution adult by GK8 will set a new standard for loftier security cryptocurrency custody offerings. He explained the manner in which the firm has designed the wallet with a minimized assault surface, noting that it works past:

"Having just outbound unidirectional communication and then building the rest of the cryptographic protocols effectually information technology using multi-party computation, validation protocols, the manual of policies to the surroundings, all while preventing the injection of malicious inputs from the internet back into the common cold wallet."

Loftier stakes

In an industry that must always keep 1 step alee of potential threat vectors, bug bounty programs serve as a useful "stress test" for cryptocurrency firms to probe the security of their solutions.

In Dec. 2022, the AirSwap decentralized exchange protocol announced its launch of a  problems bounty program with rewards of upwards to 20,000 Dai (DAI), without setting a fourth dimension limit for bug-finders.

Earlier, in October, MakerDAO had been prompted to set up a critical bug that could have resulted in a complete loss of funds for all platform users. HackerOne user lucash-dev had disclosed a report revealing a disquisitional bug in MakerDAO's planned upgrade, and was rewarded for the effort with a $50,000 compensation.