Panther Security Research

Findings, war stories, and alpha from the trenches of smart contract security

Latest Posts

February 11, 2026

The Ghost Owner — How a Forgotten State Variable Could Resurrect Ownership from the Dead

CVE-2024-45304 Cairo OpenZeppelin StarkNet

A deceptively simple vulnerability in OpenZeppelin's Cairo contracts that could let an attacker reclaim ownership of a contract the entire world believed was ownerless.

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February 23, 2026

Field Order Is Sort Order — How Struct Layout Silently Breaks Ordered Maps in Move

Move Aptos Security

Move compares structs lexicographically by field declaration order. If you use a struct as a key in an ordered map, the first field dominates sorting — not the field you think matters. A real bug from Decibel Exchange's perpetual futures DEX on Aptos.

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February 12, 2026

How to win a public contest: Lessons from 6x Top 3 Finishes

Solidity Rust Move Contests

Zero fluff, pure trenches-tested insights from climbing to the top 50s on Cantina. This is the alpha that actually moved the needle — not theory, not vibes, just what works when you're deep in the code at 3 AM and the leaderboard is watching.

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February 14, 2026

The Move Bug That Would Have Bricked AAVE on Aptos Before Day One

Move Aptos Contests Aave

A $24K finding from the AAVE Aptos V3 audit on Cantina. The bug was embarrassingly simple — data stored at one address, every getter reading from another. The entire protocol would have been dead on arrival.

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February 20, 2026

ZK Journey Week 1 — Why a Move Security Researcher Is Learning Zero Knowledge Proofs from Scratch

Move ZK Contests Rare Skills

As a Move security researcher, I need to understand ZK proofs deeply — not just what they do, but how they work under the hood. This is week 1 of my ZK learning journey at the Rare Skills ZK Bootcamp.

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February 22, 2026

The Silent Killer in Move: How return vs abort Silently Corrupts State on Chain

Move Aptos Sui Security

A real bug from Aptos core's trading engine that permanently deleted orders on an "error" path. The root cause? A return where there should have been an abort. This pattern applies to both Aptos and Sui Move.

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March 1, 2026

Auditing a Perp Protocol on Aptos Move

Move Aptos

Learnings from auditing a fully on-chain perp DEX in Move on Aptos.

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March 2, 2026

ZK Journey Week 2 — Learning Zero Knowledge Proofs from Scratch

ZK Rare Skills

As a Move security researcher, I need to understand ZK proofs deeply — not just what they do, but how they work under the hood. This is week 2 of my ZK learning journey at the Rare Skills ZK Bootcamp.

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March 3, 2026

I Open-Sourced My AI Audit Workflow — Prompts, Pipelines, and Everything I Learned

AI Audit

I open-sourced my AI audit workflow — prompts, pipelines, and everything I learned.

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March 4, 2026

ZK Journey Week 3 — Learning Zero Knowledge Proofs from Scratch

ZK Rare Skills

As a Move security researcher, I need to understand ZK proofs deeply — not just what they do, but how they work under the hood. This is week 3 of my ZK learning journey at the Rare Skills ZK Bootcamp.

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March 5, 2026

The Move Auditor

Move Aptos Claude Skill Security

It's claude skill season, and I am introducing move-auditor skill.

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March 6, 2026

How to Audit a Stablecoin Protocol

Stablecoin Solidity Diamond-Pattern

Learnings from auditing a stablecoin protocol.

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March 8, 2026

How to Audit a Gold-Backed Staking Protocol on Solana

Solana Rust Staking Security

Learnings from auditing a gold-backed staking protocol on Solana.

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March 9, 2026

ZK Journey Week 4 — Learning Zero Knowledge Proofs from Scratch

ZK Rare Skills

As a Move security researcher, I need to understand ZK proofs deeply — not just what they do, but how they work under the hood. This is week 4 of my ZK learning journey at the Rare Skills ZK Bootcamp.

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March 12, 2026

ZK Journey Week 5 — Learning Zero Knowledge Proofs from Scratch

ZK Rare Skills

As a Move security researcher, I need to understand ZK proofs deeply — not just what they do, but how they work under the hood. This is week 5 of my ZK learning journey at the Rare Skills ZK Bootcamp.

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March 13, 2026

Formal Verification of Current Sui Using Certora Sui Prover

Sui Move Certora Formal Verification

How I mathematically proved that an eMode group assignment is immutable after obligation creation in a Sui DeFi lending protocol — using Certora's Sui Prover, parametric rules, and field accessors.

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March 14, 2026

Formal Verification of Current Sui Using Certora Part 2

Sui Move Certora Formal Verification

How I used Formal Verification to find bugs in current sui.

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March 15, 2026

Formal Verification of Aptos Move Contracts Using Move Prover

Aptos Move Formal Verification

How to formally verify aptos move contracts using move prover.

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March 16, 2026

How to Audit a Lending Protocol on Sui Move

Sui Move Lending Security

Learnings from auditing a lending protocol on Sui Move.

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March 22, 2026

How to Audit Aave V3 Fork Deployment Scripts

Aave Deployment Scripts Security

Learnings from auditing Aave V3 fork deployment scripts — the bug classes, the patterns, and the real findings from production audits.

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March 24, 2026

AI Security ML01: Input Manipulation Attack

AI ML Security

How to deliberately alters input data to mislead the AI model.

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March 25, 2026

AI Security ML02: Data Poisoning Attack

AI ML Security

How to poison the data to mislead the AI model.

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March 25, 2026

AI Security ML03: Model Inversion Attack

AI ML Security

How to invert the model to get the sensitive data.

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March 26, 2026

AI Security ML04: Membership Inference Attack

AI ML Privacy Attacks

You don't need to extract the training data. You just need to ask the right questions — and the model will tell you whose data it learned from, one confidence score at a time.

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March 26, 2026

AI Security ML05: Model Theft

AI ML Intellectual Property

Your API is the heist. If a model is queryable, it is reconstructable. Every input-output pair is a brick — and a patient attacker will collect enough bricks to build your model themselves.

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March 26, 2026

AI Security ML06: ML Supply Chain Attacks

AI ML Supply Chain MLOps

The poison was already in the package. Did you audit every library your training script imported? Every model you downloaded from a public hub? The attack was already upstream.

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March 26, 2026

AI Security ML07: Transfer Learning Attack

AI ML Backdoor Attacks

The backdoor you inherited. The model passed every benchmark and scored well on your validation set — but it was trained to fail in exactly the one scenario the attacker controls.

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March 26, 2026

AI Security ML08: Model Skewing

AI ML Feedback Loop Attacks

Slow poison through the feedback loop. The model wasn't broken on day one — it was steered slowly through fake feedback until its decisions aligned with exactly what the attacker needed.

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March 26, 2026

AI Security ML09: Output Integrity Attack

AI ML Integrity Attacks

The model was right. The answer was wrong. Every other attack tampers with the model — this one intercepts the correct answer on the way out and replaces it with a lie.

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March 26, 2026

AI Security ML10: Model Poisoning

AI ML Parameter Tampering

Rewriting the brain from the inside. Goes straight to the model's parameters — the numerical weights that encode everything it has learned — and edits them to produce attacker-controlled behaviour.

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March 28, 2026

Sui Bella Ciao — Inside the New Move VM

Sui Move VM Security

Sui rewrote their entire Move VM. Here's how the new execution layer works, what changed from the old one, and where the interesting attack surface lives for security researchers.

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March 29, 2026

Sui Execution Layer — A Security Researcher's Deep Dive

Sui Move Execution Security

A deep dive into Sui's execution layer — how transactions flow from submission to state changes, and what security researchers should look for.

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March 30, 2026

Move VM Runtime — How Your Move Code Actually Runs

Sui Move VM Runtime

How the Move VM runtime actually executes your code — from bytecode loading to interpreter dispatch and native function calls.

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March 31, 2026

Sui's Cut Package — How Sui Freezes Its Execution Layer

Sui Move Execution Security

How Sui uses the cut package mechanism to freeze its execution layer — snapshotting framework code at specific protocol versions for deterministic replay.

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