Severity Definition

In the ever-evolving world of blockchain technology, vulnerabilities continue to take on new forms and arise as more innovative projects manifest, new blockchain-level features are introduced, and novel layer-2 solutions are launched. When performing security reviews, we are tasked with classifying the various types of vulnerabilities we identify into subcategories to better aid our readers in understanding their impact.

Within this page, we will clarify what each severity level stands for and our approach in categorizing the findings we pinpoint in our audits.

Severity Levels

There are five distinct severity levels within our reports; unknown, informational, minor, medium, and major. A TL;DR overview table can be found below as well as a dedicated chapter to each severity level:

	Impact (None)	Impact (Low)	Impact (Moderate)	Impact (High)
Likelihood (None)
Likelihood (Low)
Likelihood (Moderate)
Likelihood (High)

Unknown Severity

The unknown severity level is reserved for misbehaviors we observe in the codebase that cannot be quantified using the above metrics. Examples of such vulnerabilities include potentially desirable system behavior that is undocumented, reliance on external dependencies that are out-of-scope but could result in some form of vulnerability arising, use of external out-of-scope contracts that appears incorrect but cannot be pinpointed, and other such vulnerabilities.

In general, unknown severity level vulnerabilities require follow-up information by the project being audited and are either adjusted in severity (if valid), or marked as nullified (if invalid).

Additionally, the unknown severity level is sometimes assigned to centralization issues that cannot be assessed in likelihood due to their exploitation being tied to the honesty of the project's team.

Informational Severity

The informational severity level is dedicated to findings that do not affect the code functionally and tend to be stylistic or optimizational in nature. Certain edge cases are also set under informational vulnerabilities, such as overflow operations that will not manifest in the lifetime of the contract but should be guarded against as a best practice, to give an example.

Minor Severity

The minor severity level is meant for vulnerabilities that require functional changes in the code but tend to either have little impact or be unlikely to be recreated in a production environment. These findings can be acknowledged except for findings with a moderate impact but low likelihood which must be alleviated.

Medium Severity

The medium severity level is assigned to vulnerabilities that must be alleviated and have an observable impact on the overall project. These findings can only be acknowdged if the project deems them desirable behavior and we disagree with their point-of-view, instead urging them to reconsider their stance while marking the exhibit as acknowledged given that the project has ultimate say as to what vulnerabilities they end up patching in their system.

Major Severity

The major severity level is the maximum that can be specified for a finding and indicates a significant flaw in the code that must be alleviated.

Likelihood & Impact Assessment

As the preface chapter specifies, the blockchain space is constantly reinventing itself meaning that new vulnerabilities take place and our understanding of what security means differs year-to-year.

In order to reliably assess the likelihood and impact of a particular vulnerability, we instead apply an abstract measurement of a vulnerability's impact, duration the impact is applied for, and probability that the vulnerability would be exploited in a production environment.

Our proposed definitions are inspired by multiple sources in the security community and are as follows:

• Impact (High): A core invariant of the protocol can be broken for an extended duration.
• Impact (Moderate): A non-core invariant of the protocol can be broken for an extended duration or at scale, or an otherwise major-severity issue is reduced due to hypotheticals or external factors affecting likelihood.
• Impact (Low): A non-core invariant of the protocol can be broken with reduced likelihood or impact.
• Impact (None): A code or documentation flaw whose impact does not achieve low severity, or an issue without theoretical impact; a valuable best-practice
• Likelihood (High): A flaw in the code that can be exploited trivially and is ever-present.
• Likelihood (Moderate): A flaw in the code that requires some external factors to be exploited that are likely to manifest in practice.
• Likelihood (Low): A flaw in the code that requires multiple external factors to be exploited that may manifest in practice but would be unlikely to do so.
• Likelihood (None): A flaw in the code that requires external factors proven to be impossible in a production environment, either due to mathematical constraints, operational constraints, or system-related factors (i.e. EIP-20 tokens not being re-entrant).