Protocol
Security model
Vanta removes trust in operator identity only when the committed relation, verifier, and host chain remain sound.
Core assumptions
- The host chain finalizes according to its stated consensus model.
- The selected verifier implements the relation the requester intended.
- The proof system is sound under its published setup and cryptographic assumptions.
- Commitment functions resist collision and preimage attacks at the chosen security level.
- Output data required by the result policy remains retrievable.
No honesty assumption is required for an operator. An adversarial operator may return nonsense, withhold output data, submit malformed evidence, copy public calldata, front-run a result, or operate many identities.
Required invariants
| Single terminal outcome | A task cannot be both accepted and refunded, and neither transition may repeat. |
|---|---|
| Bound beneficiary | Evidence must authorize the exact address credited by settlement. |
| Domain separation | Chain, contract, and protocol version prevent evidence reuse across deployments. |
| Frozen economics | Open-task reward, charge, treasury, verifier, and deadline do not change. |
| Value conservation | Credited and remaining balances never exceed the amount actually deposited. |
| Refund liveness | An unresolved expired task has a permissionless path back to its requester. |
Threats and controls
Copied submissions
A public transaction may reveal reusable evidence. Binding the beneficiary inside the verified statement prevents a copier from redirecting payment.
Verifier compromise
Verifier identifiers are immutable and versioned. Deactivation can stop new use and, where policy permits, reject unresolved submissions; it cannot silently replace old semantics.
Unavailable output
A valid commitment does not make bytes available. Workloads must define publication, retention, or availability proofs separately.
Administrative capture
Production authority should be delayed, multisignature-controlled, narrow in scope, and observable through events. Existing task economics must remain outside mutable policy.
Reentrancy and transfer failure
Core resolution uses pull balances so external calls occur after state transitions and outside verification.
Production gates
- Independent review of contracts, adapters, and economic invariants.
- Published proof-system assumptions, verifier keys, test vectors, and benchmarks.
- Fuzzing, invariant tests, fork tests, and adversarial operator simulations.
- Reproducible deployment manifests and bytecode verification.
- Emergency procedures that preserve withdrawals and already committed terms.