Introducing ZIION: The First OS For Blockchain Security

Blockchain security auditors face significant challenges when preparing their testing and lab environments.  The smart contract ecosystem has a diverse set of platforms, many of which require their own security tools.  Often, these tools are available only as source code, requiring blockchain security auditors to compile and configure them before use.  As a result, creating a blockchain security testing environment can be a significant challenge and timesink for security auditors and students.

ZIION’s Origin Story

Halborn is a rapidly-growing blockchain security company, which means that we’re frequently onboarding new security experts and smart contract testers.  During this process, the team found that new hires were forced to spend a significant amount of time installing and configuring tools on their lab systems before they could actually start performing security audits.  

As Halborn developed its SANS SEC 554 course for smart contract security, spending the first day of the course teaching students to set up their systems would not have been a good use of time. Therefore, Halborn developers created ZIION, the world’s first operating system focused on blockchain security, in order to streamline this process for blockchain security experts and researchers around the world.  

Built on Kali Linux, ZIION is freely available and has over 100 tools pre-installed and configured out of the box.

What Is ZIION and Why Should Security Experts Use It

ZIION was designed to make it faster and easier for blockchain developers and security auditors to get started.  

Some of the key benefits that ZIION provides include the following:

• Multi-Platform Support: ZIION comes preinstalled with tools for the leading smart contract platforms, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, Terra, Polygon, BSC, Substrate, Near, and more.  This allows security auditors to use a familiar platform when examining and testing a wide range of projects.

• Pre-installed Tools: ZIION comes with a wide variety of development and security testing tools.  All of these come pre-compiled, allowing smart contract security auditors to hit the ground running.

• Built By Developers: Security auditors are developers and need the ability to examine and run code as part of their testing.  ZIION includes tools for hosting blockchain nodes and testing code within the VM.

• Common Toolset: ZIION provides a complete toolset for security testing on various blockchain platforms.  This ensures that security auditors have the tools that they need to do their jobs and supports collaboration.

• Free and Open Source: ZIION is built on Kali Linux and is freely available for download.  It’s also open source to allow customization and contributions back to the community.

Halborn built ZIION to make it easier for our team and the security community to get started with smart contract security auditing.  ZIION is available for download at ziion.org/download.  For more information on using ZIION, check out our Docs at docs.ziion.org/.