Cybersecurity systems are complex and play a fundamental role in various applications. Even in highly secure and decentralized systems like blockchain networks, there are cases in which the dApps, average users, or the network itself are exposed to many daily risks. Due to certain vulnerabilities, numerous businesses are interested in fostering research and development of security-focused solutions, which is precisely why our team is developing Tikuna.
Tikuna is a proof-of-concept P2P network security monitoring system for the Ethereum blockchain. Using Machine Learning techniques, it will extract security and performance insights for detecting relevant incidents and improving visibility to the security state of the P2P network. This proposed research project has been approved and supported by the Ethereum Foundation with an award of USD 102,200 to start the development process.
Tikuna team has approached this 2022 opening in the area of P2P Network to the Ethereum Foundation Academic Grants. We are the only team in Latin America that received approval and funding from ETH Foundation. This is the official announcement published by them.
The team behind Tikuna
The project Tikuna is led by both Edenia and Sakundi. Edenia operates an independent decentralized blockchain infrastructure and develops Web3 products. Sakundi is a blockchain security and privacy-focused research organization that provides Artificial Intelligence-powered security monitoring solutions for blockchain businesses and distributed apps.
What is the problem that Tikuna is trying to solve?
Tikuna proposes an open-source solution that provides visibility into the nodes’ status, allowing for the early detection of P2P attacks. This tool will provide the ETH Community with an extra resource for preventing or reporting incidents that could affect thousands of transactions and/or applications running on this blockchain.
What will be the final research project deliverable of Tikuna, in this first stage?
The project aims to empower the Ethereum community by providing them with an intelligent, state-of-the-art tool capable of accumulating security-related data from the state of the P2P network and enhancing network visibility by offering insights about its current state. A handy feature we plan to develop is an interactive dashboard that allows users or organizations to make queries of the nodes.
Steps toward the future….
Tikuna is an innovative solution that will support Ethereum's blockchain security, more so, in the evolution to PoS (Proof-of-Stake), where nodes play a bigger role in block validation with their participation. With how fast Web3 expands and how many applications use participating networks, we reckon that Tikuna has the potential to become a multi-chain solution. We plan to further expand Tikuna to different networks that use PoS or DPoS as their consensus mechanism.