Since early 2023, the Avalanche Foundation has been collaborating with Sigma Prime to further strengthen AvalancheGo’s stability as a codebase. The goal is to provide the best assurance that the Avalanche network maintains its established stability, giving builders and users an extra measure of confidence. Security is critical in maintaining a thriving blockchain ecosystem. Sigma Prime is one of the most reputable, battle-tested security firms in the blockchain field.

Specifically, Sigma Prime is writing a collection of fuzzers for AvalancheGo. Fuzzers provide a helpful way to detect “panics/crash” bugs beyond what would normally be expected. The Foundation plans to incorporate these fuzzers into the AvalancheGo codebase and to extend them.

As part of a continuous effort to improve AvalancheGo’s reliability and robustness, we engaged Sigma Prime, one of the most experienced fuzzers in the space, to build a dedicated framework to continuously fuzz AvalancheGo,” said Aytunç Yildizi, Executive Director at the Avalanche Foundation. “Fuzzing has uncovered critical bugs across the entire blockchain ecosystem, and this new framework will allow us to detect and remedy critical issues before they make an impact.

Why Sigma Prime?

Sigma Prime was founded in late 2016 shortly after Ethereum Devcon 2 in Shanghai by a team of developers, researchers, and security engineers. The team has extensive expertise in vulnerability research, penetration testing, and secure software development making them an ideal partner for assisting with the security posture of the Avalanche blockchain.  

Over the years, Sigma Prime has completed hundreds of security assessments on smart contracts, DeFi protocols, entire blockchains and core cryptography primitives. In addition to their contribution to the security space, they actively contribute to protocol-level research and development by building a free open-source Ethereum consensus client, Lighthouse. The domain expertise of building a blockchain client from the ground up further makes them an excellent choice for working with a layer-1 blockchain such as Avalanche.

The Lighthouse Story

Sigma Prime originally started contributing to proof-of-stake research by producing an experimental implementation of Casper TFG (“Vlad’s Casper”) and working on a voting smart contract proposal (EIP-1011). Although EIP-1011 was later deprecated, Sigma Prime embraced the Ethereum consensus spec and started work on a Rust-based open source client, called Lighthouse. Lighthouse aimed to prioritize the protocol over product delivery and focused on establishing a secure, decentralized, and efficient protocol for Ethereum.

Lighthouse is the leading open-source Ethereum consensus client, which leverages the safety features of Rust while being highly efficient. Lighthouse is funded by various organizations, including (but not limited to) the Ethereum Foundation, the Protocol Guild, Arbitrum and Gitcoin Grants. 

Today, Sigma Prime continues to stand at the forefront of maintaining the safety and reliability of Ethereum and other blockchains, including Avalanche.

For more on Sigma Prime and Lighthouse:

• Sigma Prime Website: https://sigmaprime.io

• Sigma Prime Blog: https://blog.sigmaprime.io

• Sigma Prime Twitter: https://twitter.com/sigp_io

• Lighthouse Website: https://lighthouse.sigmaprime.io/

• Lighthouse Blog: https://lighthouse.sigmaprime.io

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