# Web4 External Red-Team Plan (Proposal)

**Document type**: Security engagement proposal  
**Audience**: Web4 maintainers, external security firms, independent researchers  
**Status**: Draft for execution planning  
**Date**: 2026-02-11

> Companion implementation proposal: `review/security_reality_check_v1.md`

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## 1) Purpose

Design and run an **external adversarial assessment** of Web4 that complements (not duplicates) internal simulation-heavy attack testing. The goal is to validate security claims under realistic attacker behavior, identify exploitable implementation gaps, and prioritize mitigation work for pilot readiness.

This plan explicitly builds on existing internal adversarial work (hundreds of documented synthetic attack vectors and simulation tracks) while focusing external effort on **high-uncertainty, high-impact failure modes**.

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## 2) What Internal Testing Already Covers (Baseline)

Based on repository security/status docs and attack-catalog documentation, internal testing already includes:

- Broad synthetic attack cataloging across identity, trust, economics, governance, federation, consensus, temporal, side-channel, supply-chain, and AI/ML classes.
- Simulation-level checks for witness diversity, Sybil patterns, ATP abuse, challenge-response behavior, and trust manipulation.
- Significant scenario-count expansion over time (different docs report different totals; this itself is a documentation-consistency issue).

### Implication for external red team
External testing should **not** spend most time replaying synthetic unit-like scenarios. Instead, it should target:
1. Multi-layer kill chains across components.
2. Economic/game-theoretic exploitability in practical settings.
3. Real operator workflows, misconfiguration paths, and social/organizational attack surfaces.
4. Security boundary failures between simulation assumptions and deployable systems.

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## 3) External Engagement Objectives

### Primary objectives
1. **Validate exploitability** of key threat classes in realistic conditions.
2. **Measure detection and response** performance end-to-end, not only attack prevention.
3. **Identify control gaps** between documented security mechanisms and actual implementation/integration behavior.
4. **Generate a prioritized remediation roadmap** with evidence and reproducible PoCs where safe.

### Secondary objectives
- Improve threat-model completeness.
- Improve confidence in pilot readiness decisions.
- Establish repeatable security-assurance process for future versions.

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## 4) Scope and Rules of Engagement

## In scope (recommended)
- `simulations/` and trust/federation logic behavior under adversarial orchestration.
- `web4-standard/implementation/` authorization, reputation, security, and integration paths.
- Identity/trust primitives in `web4-core/` and `web4-trust-core/` where integration interfaces exist.
- MCP-adjacent interaction points and external tool interface assumptions.
- Documentation-to-implementation inconsistencies that create exploitable ambiguity.

## Explicit out-of-scope (initial wave)
- Production blockchain or external repos not in this repository (except interface assumptions).
- Physical hardware compromise of TPM/SE devices (can be modeled, not physically attacked in wave 1).

## Engagement constraints
- Non-destructive testing by default.
- Isolated environments for high-impact attack paths.
- Legal/ethical rules approved before launch.

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## 5) Threat Model for the External Team (Minimum)

The external team should test at least four adversary profiles:

1. **Economic adversary**: Maximizes ATP/value extraction while minimizing trust penalties.
2. **Reputation manipulator**: Builds influence via Sybil/collusion/witness abuse.
3. **Protocol attacker**: Targets consensus, timing, replay, serialization, and validation boundaries.
4. **Supply-chain/social attacker**: Exploits CI/CD, dependencies, operator workflows, and policy confusion.

Each profile should include attacker budget, capabilities, dwell-time assumptions, and success criteria.

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## 6) Key Potential Vulnerabilities (Priority Register)

## P0/P1 candidates (high-value external validation)

1. **Witness-collusion at scale with adaptive behavior**  
   Internal tests detect simple reciprocal patterns; external team should test low-and-slow cartel strategies with role cycling, timing variance, and proxy entities.

2. **Economic parameter gaming / ROI-positive Sybil strategy**  
   Validate whether stake, decay, penalties, and reward dynamics can be profitably gamed under realistic attacker budgets.

3. **Challenge-response abuse and dispute-process denial**  
   Test challenge flooding, strategic non-response, evidence laundering, and procedural stalling attacks.

4. **Cross-component trust escalation chains**  
   Start from minor trust foothold and pivot across identity → authorization → federation paths.

5. **Clock/timing/order attacks in distributed conditions**  
   Evaluate split-brain, ordering manipulation, and replay windows under network jitter, delay, and partition.

6. **Policy/language ambiguity exploitation**  
   Abuse stale docs, inconsistent definitions, and protocol ambiguity to induce unsafe or conflicting enforcement behavior.

7. **Dependency and build-pipeline poisoning**  
   Realistic package confusion, signing bypass assumptions, release artifact tampering, and CI secret handling.

8. **Agent/tool boundary compromise (prompt + toolchain)**  
   Prompt-injection-assisted privilege misuse and MCP relay abuse with chained social engineering.

## P2 candidates (follow-on)
- Side-channel signal extraction from timing/errors.
- Long-con trust farming across multiple societies/federations.
- Recovery/governance appeals gaming with socio-technical manipulation.

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## 7) Proposed Attack Campaign Structure

### Phase 0 — Preparation (1-2 weeks)
- Freeze test environment and artifact versions.
- Establish threat-model assumptions, contact matrix, and severity rubric.
- Define “critical invariants” (identity integrity, trust integrity, ATP conservation, authorization correctness, federation consistency).

### Phase 1 — Recon & Surface Mapping (1 week)
- Architecture and data-flow mapping.
- Trust/economic control-point identification.
- Attack-path hypothesis generation linked to internal catalog tracks.

### Phase 2 — Exploitation Sprints (3-5 weeks)
- Weekly focus lanes:
  1. Identity/witness/reputation lane.
  2. Economic/ATP lane.
  3. Federation/consensus/timing lane.
  4. Tooling/supply-chain/ops lane.
- Deliver proof artifacts and telemetry for each confirmed finding.

### Phase 3 — Detection/Response Exercise (1-2 weeks)
- Purple-team drills against confirmed attack paths.
- Measure MTTD, MTTR, false positive/negative rates.
- Validate whether proposed controls are operationally executable.

### Phase 4 — Remediation Verification (1-2 weeks)
- Retest fixed issues.
- Issue closure evidence and residual-risk statement.

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## 8) Metrics and Success Criteria

## Security efficacy metrics
- Confirmed exploitable findings by severity (Critical/High/Medium/Low).
- Attack success rate vs attempted campaign scenarios.
- Time-to-exploit for each priority vector.

## Detection/response metrics
- Mean time to detect (MTTD).
- Mean time to respond/contain (MTTR).
- Detection coverage against tested TTPs.

## Resilience metrics
- Invariant violations observed (count + severity).
- Economic loss/abuse simulated before containment.
- Trust-system corruption depth before rollback/repair.

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## 9) Deliverables from External Red Team

1. **Executive report**: business risk summary and prioritization.
2. **Technical report**: full findings, reproduction steps, affected components.
3. **Attack graph pack**: kill-chain diagrams and precondition maps.
4. **PoC bundle**: safe, reproducible scripts or runbooks.
5. **Remediation plan**: concrete fixes, owner suggestions, timeline tiers.
6. **Retest report**: fix validation and residual risk.

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## 10) How to Leverage Existing Internal Catalog

Use existing internal attack tracks as a **coverage seed**, then expand with external realism:

- Start from top internal categories and sample highest-impact tracks.
- Build chained scenarios that internal tests likely isolate.
- Prioritize “unknowns” explicitly called out in docs: formal threat-model gaps, economic validation, adversarial realism, and protocol hardening.

This avoids redoing work while converting internal breadth into external assurance depth.

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## 11) Suggested External Team Composition

- Lead red-team operator (distributed systems + cloud/appsec).
- Cryptography/protocol specialist.
- Adversarial ML/agent security specialist.
- Economic mechanism/game-theory analyst.
- Security engineer for tooling and telemetry.

Optional: governance/process adversary specialist for policy & appeals abuse.

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## 12) Immediate Next Steps (Actionable)

1. Approve engagement charter and rules of engagement.
2. Select 2-3 external firms/teams for scoping proposals.
3. Publish a minimal formal threat model for test alignment.
4. Prepare an isolated red-team environment and seed data.
5. Run a 2-week pilot campaign on one high-risk lane (recommended: witness/economic chain attacks).

