At Trail of Bits, we make a significant effort to stay up to date with the academic world. We frequently evaluate our work through peer-reviewed conferences, and we love to attend academic events (see our recent ICSE and Crypto recaps).

However, we consistently see one recurring issue at these academic events: a lack of reliable tools and experiments. Researchers have no incentive to maintain tools, and, most of the time, don’t have the necessary engineering resources. That’s where Trail of Bits comes in: We spend considerable effort to maintain our research-oriented, open-source tools because we want researchers to benefit from our work.

And now, to encourage more activity in this area, we’ve created the Crytic Research Prize to reward published academic papers built on our blockchain tools.

Topics of interest

Any work that is built on top of our tools is eligible.

Do you want to make an industrial-scale impact? Our team is currently interested in these topics:

• Improving the core capabilities of the tools:
  • How to make Echidna exploration smarter
  • How to make Manticore faster on smart contracts
  • How to reduce false positives from Slither
• Extending the areas of application for the tools:
  • How to model and detect race conditions precisely
  • How to automatically repair bugs
  • How to guide Echidna with machine learning or grammar-based approaches
  • Any specific instrumentation techniques for smart contracts
  • How to combine the tools
• We would especially love to see creative uses for our tools outside their original purpose. For example, see our code similarity tool based on Slither.

Rules

• The paper must be based on one of our open-source tools:
  • Echidna,
  • Manticore,
  • Slither, or
  • Other Crytic tools, such as evm-cfg-builder, but these have a lower preference.
• The paper must have been accepted in a peer-reviewed conference. We recommend:
  • ACSAC, ASE, CAV, CCS, Crypto, FC, FSE, NDSS, ICSE, ISSTA, OSDI, POPL, PLDI, S&P, S&P Europe, TACAS, and Usenix.
  • Any workshops from the conferences listed above.
• All material must be open-source, including the benchmark. We will re-run the experimentation and evaluate the tools.
• Applications must comply with the applicable US and international laws, regulations, and policies.

Trail of Bits will evaluate all entries and award cash prizes to the best papers:

• First place: 6,000 USD
• Second place: 2,000 USD
• Third place: 2,000 USD

We will close the submissions on November 1st, 2020.

We are happy to provide support for our tools. Join our Slack channel (#ethereum) if you want direct assistance from our developers.

Remember, if you want to participate in the competition, send us your paper!