Security & Audits

Core Security Mechanisms

1. Decentralization

At its core, Analog is secured by an NPoS-powered Timechain. The Timechain is designed to have no single point of failure, primarily through decentralization. Time Nodes are run by individuals or entities in a permissionless manner. All the inbound/outbound messages and decisions made through state changes are validated on-chain, and the authored blocks are immutable, verifiable, and always available.

2. Threshold Signature Schemes (TSS)

To effect state changes on external chains, Timechain authorizes a single shard that utilizes FROST TSS  to sign messages, mitigating the risks inherent in a centralized signing key. No single node operator or individual entity has access to the complete private at any point in time. Although certain aspects of the Chronicle Nodes network are not fully decentralized at present, we plan to progressively decentralize this in future iterations.

3. Key Rotations

The Timechain employs a key rotation mechanism to enhance security. Periodically, the protocol churns out some Chronicle Nodes from their shards and replaces them with standby nodes. The new shard then generates a new TSS key, ensuring only a supermajority of Chronicle Nodes within that shard can participate in message signing.

Timechain Safe Mode

Analog, like any complex distributed system, is designed with the understanding that not everything will function as intended, even with careful precautions. Timechain Safe Mode—an inbuilt redundancy feature—allows Time Nodes to temporarily suspend most core protocol functions in response to potential security threats or instabilities.

When activated, the safe mode allows validators to continue authoring blocks, processing key extrinsics and events, while significantly halting other protocol tasks like key rotations, staking claims, and cross-chain requests.

Open Source

In the future, we will make Analog’s core repositories fully open source, allowing the community to freely contribute to the protocol’s development.

Audits

Analog has thoroughly been audited by Hacken,  with more audits from third-party companies to come. The auditing report can be found here .