Security Glossary — Incident Response and Smart Contract Attack Terms

Access Control Vulnerability

A security flaw where privileged functions (admin, mint, pause) lack proper access checks, allowing unauthorized callers to execute them.

Attack Vector

The specific path or method an attacker uses to exploit a vulnerability — e.g., 'reentrancy via fallback function' or 'flash loan price manipulation of oracle.'

Audit Trail

An immutable, chronological record of all actions and state changes, used for forensic investigation after an incident.

Circuit Breaker

An emergency pause mechanism that halts contract functionality when triggered, providing time to assess and respond to an attack.

Emergency Response Team

A pre-designated group with clear authority and process to respond to smart contract incidents — defined before any incident, not assembled ad hoc during one.

Exploit

A specific technique leveraging a vulnerability to extract value or cause unauthorized state changes. Note: in security, 'exploit' refers to the method, not just the vulnerability.

Flash Loan Attack

An attack using uncollateralized borrowing (available within a single transaction) to amplify the attacker's effective capital for market manipulation or protocol exploitation.

Governance Attack

An attack exploiting a protocol's governance mechanism to pass malicious proposals — typically using borrowed voting power (flash loan governance attack) or accumulating tokens for this purpose.

Incident Report

A structured post-mortem document (often public for transparent DeFi protocols) detailing what happened, root cause analysis, affected amounts, and remediation steps taken.

Post-Mortem

A detailed analysis conducted after an incident, focused on understanding root cause and systemic improvements rather than assigning blame.

Price Oracle Manipulation

Temporarily distorting an asset's reported price (via flash loans, sandwich attacks, etc.) to exploit protocols that rely on that price for collateral, liquidation, or settlement calculations.

Protocol Pause

Halting specific or all protocol functions via an authorized pause mechanism, typically activated by a multi-sig guardian role in response to an attack or critical vulnerability.

Re-entrancy Guard

A defense mechanism preventing re-entrancy attacks, implemented via OpenZeppelin's ReentrancyGuard contract or manually via a locked state variable.

Responsible Disclosure

The practice of privately reporting a discovered vulnerability to the affected protocol before public disclosure, allowing time for patching — the ethical standard in security research.

Sandwich Attack

A form of market manipulation where an attacker front-runs a large trade (buying before it) and back-runs it (selling after) to extract value from the manipulated price movement.

Slippage Attack

Exploiting a user's set slippage tolerance to extract maximum value, often combined with sandwich attacks.

War Room

The emergency coordination space (typically a private Discord or Telegram channel) where the incident response team assembles during an active attack to coordinate response actions.

White Hat

A security researcher who discovers and responsibly discloses vulnerabilities for bug bounties or to protect protocols, as opposed to black hats who exploit vulnerabilities for profit.