dont you find all the string parsing and manipulation to be quite painful in Swift? I tried to do AoC in Swift before and that put me off a lot. I liked doing little functional one liners but a week from now the parsing burden will be too high.
1. This is really hard to enumerate. I basically am always doing recon and don't do it 1 target at a time either. I'd been looking at Sei's V2 upgrade code on and off for months, and made my report when they merged the v2 branch to master (this action put the code in-scope for a bounty). I'd found a handful of other critical bugs on the way but they were fixed eventually either in the course of normal development or audits. I definitely spent upwards of 40 very focused hrs in total investigating this codebase along with its dependencies Cosmos/Tendermint. Probably much more time less focused. Cosmos&TM are quite big. But those dependencies are used in many other projects too, so it can't be purely accounted towards time on Sei.
2. I am a very experienced security researcher/pentester/whatever we want to call it, specifically in the blockchain niche. I'm OK at the other stuff (reversing, cryptography, web, mobile, etc). Networking probably alright? I'm comfortable saying I have a good mind for security and a wide knowledge of the basics in many fields, then a very deep knowledge of a select few areas.
The answer to this question is out there, but the reports are not published yet.
I caution readers to not make rash judgements on their skill like this though. These bugs are really hard to find, and it was a minor miracle that I noticed these ones at all. I actually had a whole list of critical bugs in this codebase ready to report before the V2 upgrade was merged to master (which would put it in scope for a bounty). However the auditors managed to find every single bug on my list. I only noticed the ones that eventually made it here later, by a stroke of luck, and after I had already spent a ton of time looking at this codebase without noticing them.
Typically networking. I spent some time working at a reputable firm in this space as well.
One way to do this is to show some chops on the competition sites and then move to one of the organized freelance firms like Spearbit or yAudit. In doing all of these things you'll inevitably meet more people, build a specialty, get some reputation, etc.
Projects are free to change their terms and the page you link has been updated since I submitted my reports. The maximum was lowered to $1M and payment currency changed from USDC to SEI.
2. Well, I'm currently not employed full time and I do spend a lot of time bounty hunting. But I mix it in with other things as well, like competitive security reviews on https://sherlock.xyz or https://cantina.xyz and private contracted security reviews.
It was advertised in advance, but the real gamble is on if they'll pay. If you go to my other blogpost linked in OP, you can see a case where I was owed 500k and paid 60k.
You're right though that it's a lot of risk. It's not something that most of the leaderboard works full time on, though some of us do. The immunefi homepage has a list of all the bounties on offer.
It's up there but not singularly so. Twice there have been $10M! You can see the leaderboard where the majority of crypto bounties are represented here (https://immunefi.com/leaderboard/) but you have to search around for the actual reports.
> Technologists describe their systems as having “uptime” and measure it in “nines”, such as “We have five nines of uptime”, which means that a system has 99.999% uptime or, equivalently, about five minutes of downtime per year. Five nines is admirable in many circumstances and would be considered _disastrously_ below expectations for e.g. Google Search.
This seems wrong? 5 9s is probably a reasonable benchmark or even unattained goal for Google Search, right?