Announcing Oak Security: Protecting the Next Generation of Decentralized Applications
By: Stefan Beyer
Tags: Blockchain Security, Blockchain, Distributed Ledgers, Smart Contracts

Only last year, a whopping 3.8 billion USD has been compromised by blockchain security vulnerabilities, according to reports. New exploits are discovered almost on a weekly basis. We are on a mission to help users, investors, and builders to gain confidence in the system by providing services and products to secure decentralized applications.

Today we are proud to announce the launch of Oak Security, a company providing security consulting and audits of blockchain solutions, particularly those based on third-generation blockchain technology.

Oak Security focuses on decentralized applications on proof-of-stake (PoS) platforms, such as Cosmos, Terra, Polkadot, and Flow. Oak already is the leading service provider for CosmWasm. Despite this new incorporation, Oak Security is founded by a highly successful and experienced team of security experts that have worked together for many years and our clients have a combined market cap of over 10 billion USD.

Who are we?

The Oak team is led by two blockchain veterans, Philip Stanislaus and Stefan Beyer:

Philip Stanislaus

Philip has worked as an engineer, architect, and security reviewer in the blockchain space since 2018. During that time, he helped to bootstrap the Flow blockchain, Centrifuge, and has been a driving force behind the architecture of Snowbridge, the trustless bridge between Polkadot and Ethereum. Philip has performed many security audits, among the projects are Terra, Mirror, and Anchor. Prior to the crypto space, Philip worked for 14+ years as an independent software engineer and founder of various startups. Philip holds an MPhil in Economics from the University of Cambridge.

Stefan Beyer

Stefan has obtained a Ph.D. for his work on operating systems in 2004 and has worked in distributed systems ever since, working on consensus- and related protocols even before the invention of Bitcoin. Since 2017, he has audited hundreds of projects in the last four years, including Hermez, Hop Protocol, Polymath, Nexus Mutual, and Yield Protocol. He co-founded the security company Cryptonics three years ago. He has also been known in the blockchain community as the lead auditor for Solidified.

Our Services

We strive to secure decentralized applications throughout their lifecycle:

Design Phase: We help our clients design their systems with security in mind from the beginning. Our services in this phase include crypto-economic and technical modeling, protocol-level security analysis, and architecture reviews. Building Phase: At the actual coding level, we provide code reviews/security audits focused on various programming languages, including Go, Rust, Cadence, and Solidity. Our focus is on smart contracts and blockchain implementations for 3rd generation blockchains, covering technologies such as Cosmos SDK, CosmWasm, Substrate/Polkadot, Ink!, and Flow. Operations: For many security firms involvement stops after code reviews. However, providing a blockchain-based service involves many security-relevant operational choices, such as key management, node operation, and internal security policies. Oak Security offers comprehensive security consulting to make running a blockchain project as secure as possible.

Our Partners

Oak Security has a number of important partnerships in place:

We are the preferred audit partner for the Cosmos-based Terra blockchain, having audited the core protocol, and a number of core projects (Anchor, Mirror and Nebula). We also provide audits to Terra-sponsored third parties as a preferred partner of the Terraform Capital fund.

We have also signed a partnership agreement with Flow blockchain which involves a series of upcoming audits of the platform itself and Cadence smart contracts.

In addition, we have partnered with a number of projects to provide long-term security auditing services, including pNetwork and Sifchain.

We will provide more details on each of these partnerships in upcoming announcements.

Get in touch

We are hiring — know an all-star security researcher? Learn more about our open positions.

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