Reflection and Insights on the Cetus Protocol Hacker Attack Incident

A certain protocol recently released a security "review" report regarding a hacker attack. The report is quite transparent in terms of technical details and emergency response disclosures, making it a textbook case. However, when addressing the core question of "why it was hacked," the report seems to sidestep the issue.

The report extensively explains the checking error of the checked_shlw function in the integer-mate library (should be ≤2^192, but is actually ≤2^256), and characterizes it as a "semantic misunderstanding". While this description is technically defensible, it cleverly shifts the focus onto external responsibility, as if the protocol itself is also an innocent victim of this technical flaw.

However, it is worth pondering: since integer-mate is a widely used open-source math library, why did such a ridiculous error occur in this protocol, allowing one to obtain a sky-high liquidity share with just 1 token?

Analyzing the hacker's attack path reveals that successfully implementing an attack requires simultaneously meeting four conditions: incorrect overflow checks, significant bit shift operations, ceiling rounding rules, and a lack of economic rationality verification. Surprisingly, the protocol exhibited "carelessness" in every "trigger" condition: accepting user inputs like 2^200, employing extremely dangerous large bit shift operations, and wholly relying on the external library's checking mechanism. Most critically, when the system calculated an obviously unreasonable result of "1 token for an exorbitant share," it executed it directly without any economic common-sense checks.

Therefore, the real questions that this protocol needs to reflect on include:

1. Why was there insufficient security testing when adopting a general external library? Although the integer-mate library has characteristics such as being open-source, popular, and widely used, when managing assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the protocol clearly lacks a deep understanding of the security boundaries of that library, as well as alternative solutions when the library's functionality fails. This exposes the protocol's shortcomings in supply chain security awareness.

2. Why allow the input of astronomical numbers without setting reasonable boundaries? While decentralized financial protocols pursue openness, the more open a mature financial system is, the more it needs clear boundaries. Allowing such exaggerated values to be inputted shows that the team lacks risk management talent with financial intuition.

3. Why were issues not detected in advance despite multiple rounds of security audits? This reflects a fatal cognitive bias: the project team completely outsources security responsibility to security companies, treating audits as a get-out-of-jail-free card. However, security audit engineers are primarily skilled at identifying code vulnerabilities and seldom consider the potential problems when the test system calculates an extremely unreasonable exchange ratio.

This cross-boundary verification of mathematics, cryptography, and economics is precisely the biggest blind spot in the field of modern decentralized finance security. Audit firms may consider this to be an economic model design flaw rather than a code logic issue; the project parties may complain that the audit failed to uncover the problem; and ultimately, it is the users' assets that suffer.

This incident exposed the systemic security shortcomings in the decentralized finance industry: teams with purely technical backgrounds often lack a fundamental "financial risk intuition."

According to the report of the protocol, the team seems to have not fully realized this. Instead of just focusing on the technical flaws of this hacker attack, all decentralized finance teams should break through the limitations of pure technical thinking and truly cultivate the security risk awareness of "financial engineers."

Specific measures may include: introducing financial risk control experts to fill the knowledge gaps in the technical team; establishing a multi-party audit review mechanism that not only focuses on code auditing but also pays attention to economic model auditing; cultivating a "financial sense" by simulating various attack scenarios and corresponding response measures, and maintaining a high level of vigilance against abnormal operations.

This reminds us of the consensus among professionals in the security industry: as the industry matures, pure technical vulnerabilities at the code level will gradually decrease, while the "awareness vulnerabilities" of business logic with unclear boundaries and ambiguous responsibilities will become the biggest challenge.

Audit companies can ensure that the code is free of vulnerabilities, but achieving "logical boundaries" requires the project team to have a deeper understanding of the essence of the business and the ability to control boundaries. This also explains the fundamental reason why many projects that have undergone security audits still suffer from hacker attacks.

The future of decentralized finance will undoubtedly belong to those teams that not only have strong coding skills but also a deep understanding of business logic!