Riptide - Taking Back the Blockchain from AI Blackhats

So, I want to touch on two things. Uh number one is I almost got scammed yesterday. So, we released this big news on our end. You can check my Twitter 0xRiptide. And we found we protected 28 million from immediate theft.

Uh we were rewarded a quarter million in a bug bounty. And so, we had a lot of journalists, a lot of people reaching out. So, this person reaches out and she says, "Oh, yeah, I'm a Wall Street Journal journalist." I said, "Okay, wow, great." Okay, let's let's set up a call.

And uh she says, "Oh, uh put in my calendar." Okay, great. And then she says, "Oh, here, you can you can download uh our our app here, Salely." And I said, "Not downloading anything. What is this?

Can we just do Google Meet?" "No, no, no, it's uh it's it's banned. We can't do it in our organization." Okay. I deep dive, like this is how good they are, is on the journal's website, they had an outdated link from an old reporter who had left the company, but that ghost link when you when you go recursively through the directory, it's page not found, page not found, but this this link was still there and it was legit.

And then her supervisor, who was another outdated reporter, her ex account had been compromised. She said, "Oh, you can verify contact her." I contact her. "Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm legit." And so, I finally put it together.

I'm like, "Oh my god, this was like the second time in a week where I almost got scammed." So, it's so real and um it just makes me think of like another analogy before I kick this off is is like goes into fitness, right? Um I used to be big into the gym, I'd go to the gym, think I was great. And then uh during COVID, all the gyms closed. So, I said, "Hey, I'm going to go to the calisthenics bars."

And I went out there and I found, man, I know everything about fitness. And these guys are doing handstands on bars, they're doing balancing, all these things that I couldn't do. And I thought, oh man, this is uh you know, it was an eye-opener. Like there's always something that you don't know about whatever topic you think you're an expert in. So, like security, we're on the blockchain a lot.

We think, hey, we know everything about it. And then you could get fished and lose your private key. Uh there's you know, a web two compromise in the front end you don't see and you sign the wrong thing. So, there's always something that we could learn and I think AI is one of those things where uh for bug hunters like me, it's it was kind of hard to accept that it was better than me. Like it could find bugs quicker than me.

Yeah, there's false positives. Yeah, there's there's downsides to it. But the way it could uh ramp you up to a code base and explain everything and identify things that you would miss. I mean, it's amazing. You have to recognize that and just adapt to the future.

That's it. So, um how do we fight back about this AI black hat threat which is happening? Um there's like there's no specific statistics, right? But what's happening over the last 12 months and I'll peg it at last summer because that's when we had kind of a a very good working protocol of Grego AI and we're able to find public bug bounty criticals with it. And so, the last 12 months I started looking at these hacks.

And I'm seeing things that uh at first I noticed an uptick in the frequency of these hacks, which is surprising. You're like, okay, what's what's happening here? And then um the complexity uh wasn't really there. You'd see hacks that kind of are basic hacks. You know, basic bugs that keep resurfacing, but maybe just no one could find them.

And so, these AI hacks, people are obviously scanning and they're finding and things and and black hatting them and exploiting them. So, 1.6 bill, a lot of this is um not just like it's like the the drift hack that was just explained. Like a lot of this is private key compromise, fishing, um there's so many other vectors than just If you look historically at all the hacks, it's always private key compromise. I mean, the humans are the the weakest link, as always.

Uh but there's still a lot of DeFi smart contract exploits, but more and more we're seeing more on um DLT, distributed ledger ledger technology, so blockchain back end. Uh who am I? If you don't know me, um found uh probably the biggest bug was uh in Arbitrum, where I took over the bridge, showed that you could take it over. Uh that was a monster, but I've been doing this for about 5 years, uh hunting bugs manually, and now uh since last summer, I saw the shift with LLMs, and then um me and my co-founder started GregoAI, and we basically like plugged in my bounty hunting brain into um an AI. So, all right, so what does this look like?

Like you see these black hat attacks, and you're like, "Okay, what are they doing?" Are they just saying, you know, "Find all bugs." Okay. No. Imagine that you could take yeah, on chain, it's very easy if you know what you're doing to steal money.

And you can take whatever you want, you could wash it, you could do all this anonymously. If you screw up, that's on your own opsec, but you could probably do this, unfortunately, uh because of the blockchain and and how privacy works. So, these guys, I mean, they've they've automated the whole flow um almost, and it's just about fine-tuning their models, um paying the cost for compute. If you have state-level actors like North Korea, that's not really a concern at all. But yeah, I mean, you scope out the chain, you find targets.

A lot of these targets are um contracts that were never verified that no one bothered to take a look at because they don't have the time to decompile to hunt down these bugs specifically and and you know, just take the time to do it with AI it's trivial. Why not do it? Uh crafting the payloads for for exportation um executing everything like everything is just so seamless and so easy to do. Uh it's I mean, this is this is the the kind of the arena that we play in. So, the black hats are going to black hat and so, what do we do you know, to to defend against this seems impossible.

Uh here's what we're doing now. So, right now we have manual code code audits. These point-in-time audits I think are the biggest problem that we need to address. We have AI being able to do this so much quicker. Uh there are there are major flaws to it, but what we could do now like why do this kind of um manual audit 2 3 months in the pipeline?

It costs a lot of money when we could do this uh a hybrid audit. I I still love manual audits are great, but we can we can um add to this using AI using proper AI techniques and um constantly audit the protocol. There's no reason you can't constantly review your protocol once a month, once on every PR, or you know, after every major code revision or update you should review. It's not just this is fine uh 4 years later it's going to be fine. You just you can't assume that anymore.

Uh we still have static analyzers. Those are still good. Um bug bounties, on-chain monitoring. So, a lot of this is just like every angle it's like having like you have a bank, right? And normally a physical bank can get breached by only some really gangster attackers that are willing to risk it all.

And then you have the blockchain where you could simulate your attacks. And now you have a guy amped up on stimulants who is plugged into the biggest supercomputer in the world and he's constantly attacking your protocol. And it's just it's insane. And so all the old techniques, you just you have to fight AI with AI. So, some of the things I can recommend, um proactively AI audit, like I was talking about.

Adversarial red teaming. This is This is like what we used to do with any security-focused team uh would do along with the amplified bug bounty programs. It's like instead of thinking like a dev, which a lot of devs do, is like how do I make this flow great for the user? What do I do for the user? You need to think about what if you were the hacker?

Like why would you deposit first? Why wouldn't I withdraw first? Why wouldn't I call the uh uh accumulate interest function? Like just think of weird things like that, and you should have a a cohort of SRs with your protocol in a war room, and you say, "Hey, test my protocol. Like does this make sense?"

And they're going to try to break it, and they can use AI to break it. They could use whatever they can to break it, but you can't think like a dev um and just constantly assume that they the current flow and the planned flow, everything's going to go to plan. It never happens. Okay, these are these are Riptide's favorite things to tell devs. Uh number one, security first.

You If you are a vibe coder, you must focus on security. If you have no idea what you're doing, you're vibe coding a protocol, and you're going to put that out there in the blockchain, you're insane. If you're a dev that knows what they're doing, and you're vibe coding, cool, cuz you're going to check everything afterwards. But you have to develop this mindset like how am I going to build this up where it's going to be secure not just from a functionality perspective. Uh immutability which I love to see which we see in uh from from Maker from Curve we see with Uniswap we see with a few protocols but everyone is hooked on the proxy contract.

And they love being able to upgrade they love admin keys and centralization and everything's we flag as auditors and we look at bug hunters and and we try to tell protocols about these things and um they just they want that centralized control. One for flexibility if something goes wrong they want to be able to pause it they want to be able to make changes. Uh but two it's just it's just it's so unsafe and no one realizes this or they're willing to accept the risk of it being unsafe. Uh your test suite. This is a great way to find bugs that um I think a lot of experienced bug hunters use is they can they can look at your code base and they could say well what questions did they ask?

Let me go look at their test suite and this is why some projects won't reveal their test suite but you could see exactly what the devs were thinking and you could say well what did they test for? What what questions are they asking? And if you don't ask the right questions well you're missing things and when you're missing things I'm going to try to find those things and find bugs and try to break your protocol. Like I said the black hat mindset uh always think like a black hat on your protocol. Uh and this also goes with when you use AI.

So if you're going to make a a prompt and there's so many prompts and skills out there I can get into all of that but if you're going to make a prompt make sure you're asking the right questions on this prompt. Are you going to say you know download a bunch of skills or or whatever or you're just going to ask certain questions that you know about your protocol and you're going to say, well, can this you know, if I was a hacker and I come at it very exact. So, you want to describe an exact pathway. You can't just be general and say find all the bugs. You have to specifically tell it this is the attack I'm thinking of.

Would this work? And if you do that consistently and you write the right test, you're going to be a very secure protocol. I'll tell you that. Uh you get formally verified by Certora or use their tool and you think, oh wow, this is great. That's all That's just like your test suite.

If your spec is wrong and you verify an incorrect spec, what big deal? You've You've done nothing, but you've just showed uh that investors will think you're secure cuz they see uh that you've been proved, but your spec is wrong and there's another bug waiting to pop up. And last one uh last two ask AI, like I said, uh with Gregor AI, we have a great product, I think. Um we're the only deep scan kind of AI program out there. Uh but you can also just just use it on your own.

Just ask those right questions. Don't don't fall into the skills trap and all that stuff. Just just ask pointed questions at the LLM. Uh the last one is kind of uh point of contention with some people, but I think DeFi in general is absolutely crazy that it's 2026 and you could drain entire protocol on one transaction still to this day. And we wonder why people are taking their money out of the ecosystem.

If you have any rate limiting circuit breaker, something like that. Like why and I get it, right? I'm all about DeFi. But why Why do you have to withdraw 100 million in one transaction? You can't do that over two, three?

Like that's That's all not possible. And I I understand composability, flash loans, the argument, but this is not the worst thing to have and I do hope we see more of it. Uh some things you could use today, the typical things that we have here. Uh I'm sure you all heard of these, Slither Mythril. Uh fuzzing.

Uh I I'd like to give Recon some love, uh made by uh Alex. Uh really good framework for fuzzing. Uh they built in Foundry stuff at Kidna. Uh if you don't use Tenderly, they're really good for doing your simulations, uh especially transaction simulations on anything you're going to sign. Uh build your own skills, your own harnesses using AI.

Um just your protocol's unique. You can even use AI to develop your own skills and harness, but customize it specifically for your protocol. Uh and my favorite, [clears throat] your brain, and your favorite SR, right? These are the final kind of human things, because I advocate a hybrid audited approach, hybrid security approach. Like read your code.

I don't care how big it is. If you're going to attract major TVL, you need to read your code. And this is what all the top any any good audit firm will do this. Line by line, you're going to review your code, and just focus, think about it from an adversarial mindset. And then get your favorite uh hacker in there and incentivize them, give them some future tokens, and have them try to break your code all the time.

Uh humble shill, right? So, at Grego AI, we built a couple things. First was our deep audit, and this was this was uh the whole goal of this company, right? Was to find bugs that humans can't find, because LLMs are probabilistic. They're very different than static analyzers.

Uh they're different than anything else, because you've seen this, you could run a prompt, and you could say, "Okay." It gives you five bucks. You run the same prompt, you get five new bucks. And you're like, "This is This is really crazy." You do this on complex codebases.

And when you when you use our framework, it's it's crazy what it comes up with. Um And it's very interesting in some of the edge cases that it comes up with, as a bug hunter doing this professionally, I would have never combined the different bug classes in a way that it has. And that's why I see it as like you have to have a hybrid audit. You can't just do human alone because there are bugs that any top auditor will say, "Hey, yes, we we missed it." And that's our eye-opening moment to use AI.

So, we have kind of a a cheaper version, which is a surface scan. Uh we would say to use that after a security review. Uh the deeper audit is like you're about to go mainnet. We compare it to a human audit. It's not This isn't uh like the other AI scan competitors.

It's much more compute heavy, but the whole goal is to promise security for your protocol. Uh so, if you've seen the news recently, we protected 28 million. Um we can't disclose the protocol. Uh earned a quarter million in bug bounty uh just for that one. We've earned a half a million uh in bug bounties over the past few months.

Uh we have We've been building this since um before uh summer of 2025. So, it's been um a pretty pretty deep uh deep build in the making. And my co-founder is is big into AI, younger guy, and we combined kind of his AI knowledge with my bug hunter knowledge, and we created this this crazy project to hopefully help enhance the security of Ethereum and all these EVM chains. It's language agnostic. We found bugs in in Go and Move and Solidity.

Uh it doesn't really matter. But the whole goal is like I can't realistically and and I'm a OG blockchain, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum guy. Uh And I I believe in it, and I think that this is the future, but we have so many security problems that we need to fix. And it's I can't even recommend it to investors because security is a joke, unfortunately. So, I'm trying to do my part while building a business to help hopefully improve the security of the ecosystem.

[sighs]

So, you can price out a scan uh for yourself if you'd like, scan.grego.ai. It's still kind of white-listed because I can't have black hats going on there and paying for some scans and then we give them the bugs. Um but feel free to try it out.

Uh if you want more info, you know, please uh please message me and and we could talk further. So, that's all I got. Thank you.