Arbitrum Security Council Election System

Arbitrum Security Council Elections audit details

• Total Prize Pool: $90,500 USDC
  • HM awards: $61,875 USDC
  • Analysis awards: $3,750 USDC
  • QA awards: $1,875 USDC
  • Bot Race awards: $5,625 USDC
  • Gas awards: $1,875 USDC
  • Judge awards: $9,000 USDC
  • Lookout awards: $6,000 USDC
  • Scout awards: $500 USDC
• Join C4 Discord to register
• Submit findings using the C4 form
• Read our guidelines for more details
• Starts August 3, 2023 20:00 UTC
• Ends August 10, 2023 20:00 UTC

IMPORTANT NOTE: Prior to receiving payment from this audit you MUST become a Certified Contributor (successfully complete KYC). You do not have to become certified before submitting bugs. But you must successfully complete the certification process within 30 days of the audit end date in order to receive awards. This applies to all audit participants including wardens, teams, bot crews, judges, lookouts, and scouts.

For the Gas award pool the only concern is for gas usage related to voting, this does not include executing the proposal and the rest of its lifecycle since these are one-off operations.

Automated Findings / Publicly Known Issues

Automated findings output for the audit can be found here within 24 hours of audit opening.

Note for C4 wardens: Anything included in the automated findings output is considered a publicly known issue and is ineligible for awards.

Overview

Arbitrum is a suite of scaling solutions providing environments with high-throughput, low-cost smart contracts, backed by industry-leading proving technology rooted in Ethereum. The Arbitrum DAO governs the Arbitrum One and Nova chains. The Security Council is responsible for making emergency response decisions when the community needs to address a critical security risk to the protocol. They are a 12 member council from independent organisations that hold the ability to conduct emergency actions to the Arbitrum chains. The 12 member council is separated into 2 cohorts which are elected alternatively every 6 months.

The codebase includes the subsystem of Arbitrum Governance that allows these cohorts to be managed and elected through an on-chain suite of smart contracts written in Solidity.

A summary of the statement of project can be found in the Arbitrum Governance forums.

As explained in the post, the Arbitrum Constitution already specifies the behaviour of the elections, it should be considered a bug if the implementation deviates from the Constitution in a way not documented in the forum statement above.

The elections share the same timelocks as the core governance flow.

They also use the Governance Action Contracts both in activation and in the ongoing flow.

Throughout the codebase, language of “contenders”, “nominees” and “members” is used:

• “contender” - someone who can receive votes in the nominee selection stage but who has received less than 0.2% of votable tokens
• “nominee” - someone who has received 0.2% of votable tokens in the nominee selection stage
  • “compliant” / “noncompliant” indicates whether they’ve been excluded by the nominee vetter
• “member” - a member of the security council

In-depth documentation on the system can also be found in Security Council Manager as a source of truth , Security Council Election and Membership Management and Nominee vetting guidelines.

A technical deep dive session will be hosted on Twitter Spaces on Friday August 4th.

You can also join Arbitrum's discord server to learn more and join the on-going discussions.

Areas of concern

• Ensure that the implementation does not deviate from the constitution in any way that’s not documented in the forum post
• Ensure that existing Governance security is not affected in any way by the new elections
• Ensure that the elections contracts do not allow any new parties to gain governance power (power to call the upgrade executors in arbitrary ways) in the system - other than the security council and the dao which already have governance power
• Ensure the power to upgrade any of the election contracts is held only by the DAO and the Security councils
• Ensure that elections can be created and progressed by any party, inline with the correct schedule
• Ensure only the DAO or Security Council can change the election process in any way
• Ensure that votes are not double counted in the governors, and conform to the weighting schedule specified in the Constitution

Known risks

• It’s possible for Core Governance and the elections to schedule the same operation in timelocks, and therefore block each other. However the DAO would need to do this on purpose, and against their Constitution. If the DAO is willing to make proposals against their Constitution then they can arbitrarily change all the contracts, so a clashing operation is not considered an issue.
• The Security Council can create updates in the SecurityCouncilManager that could cause an election execution to fail. They are expected to take care when making these kinds of updates not to cause that issue. Since the Security Council can technically change all the contracts, a Council that is causing disruption can already do so in much wider ways.
• An additional method “rotateMember” is provided that does the same as “replaceMember”. Although this method has the same functionality as “replaceMember” it has a different semantic meaning as it should be used to change the key of an existing member, rather than replace a member of with a different one.

Scope

List all files in scope in the table below (along with hyperlinks) -- and feel free to add notes here to emphasize areas of focus.

For line of code counts, we recommend using cloc.

All referenced code is frozen at commit hash c18de53820c505fc459f766c1b224810eaeaabc5.

Out of scope

There are multiple other contracts in the repo that correspond to the rest of Arbitrum's governance system. Those contracts are out of scope for the competition but are eligible for the Immunify bug bounty program.

Scoping Details

- If you have a public code repo, please share it here: https://github.com/ArbitrumFoundation/governance
- How many contracts are in scope?: 20
- Total SLoC for these contracts?: 2184 
- How many external imports are there?: 16
- How many separate interfaces and struct definitions are there for the contracts within scope?: 13 
- Does most of your code generally use composition or inheritance?: Inheritance
- How many external calls?: 8
- What is the overall line coverage percentage provided by your tests?: 94%
- Is this an upgrade of an existing system?: No
- Check all that apply (e.g. timelock, NFT, AMM, ERC20, rollups, etc.): Timelock function, Use rollups, Multi-Chain, ERC-20 Token
- Is there a need to understand a separate part of the codebase / get context in order to audit this part of the protocol?: Yes. 
- Please describe required context: They must understand the governance lifecycle flow of Arbitrum. They dont need in-depth knowledge, but a high level understanding.  
- Does it use an oracle?:  No
- Describe any novel or unique curve logic or mathematical models your code uses: None
- Is this either a fork of or an alternate implementation of another project?:  No 
- Does it use a side-chain?: No
- Describe any specific areas you would like addressed: Read "Areas of concern" above
- In the event of a DOS, could you outline a minimum duration after which you would consider a finding valid?: Any scenario where a malicious actor disrupts the system long enough to compromise the integrity of the elections.
- Can you specify on which blockchains your smart contracts will be deployed?: Ethereum and Arbitrum. The timelocks have code associated with them to handle crosschain messages

Tests

To run the Security Council Election tests

git clone https://github.com/code-423n4/2023-08-arbitrum
git submodule update --init --recursive
cd governance
foundryup
make install
make build
make sc-election-test

To run code coverage

make coverage

To run gas benchmarks

make gas