ExCraft’s Unique Internal Architecture
Our last article External Risk Management in ExCraft’s Architecture discussed how ExCraft analyzes and categorizes threats coming from outside of our exchange. The write-up previous to that in a section titled “What does ExCraft do differently” glossed over the internal makeup that makes ExCraft state-of-the-art. Before continuing, please review these posts on Medium if you have not read them already.
Beyond hacking, CEXs have suffered scalability issues, performance outages, and long delays in implementing new trading assets; this is because most exchanges were built hastily as a single service, meaning that there is less protection between different layers. The monolithic design of traditional CEXs result in poor performance that is difficult to scale and lacks security between operational strata. Minute exploits in a server’s code could permit an attacker entry to compromise an exchange built using this outline, which has happened repeatedly. Relying on a firewall around your exchange should not be sufficient enough to ensure user confidence. ExCraft believes each exchange service must be isolated, hardened, and fine-tuned.
Most existing exchanges are coupled to physical resources relying on specific technologies in colocation facilities and inherently lack scalability, as well as the ability to pivot into better solutions. Throughout this discourse, we will delve into four main areas of interest internally that not only allow ExCraft to manage risk better than major exchanges, but also make us the most scalable, hybrid exchange available today.
Perimeter
Ensuring protection of our users’ data and information is of the highest priority. ExCraft separates our internal network from the core functions of our exchange by using Google’s Compute Engine and Cloud Platform; this serves two purposes: It allows us to make use of all the additional tools that come with Google’s Cloud services and limits access to ExCraft operational staff departments. Despite many people’s opinion on Google, their services meet the highest levels of regulatory compliance across all Cloud technologies. Like ExCraft, they use independent auditing services to meet standards requirements in security and privacy including ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, SOC 2, and SOC 3.
ISO27001 — a security standard that outlines and provides the requirements for an information security management system (ISMS). It specifies a set of best practices and details a list of security controls concerning the management of information risks.
ISO27017 — gives guidelines for information security controls applicable to the provision and use of cloud services by providing:
Additional implementation guidance for relevant controls specified ISO27002
Additional controls with implementation guidance that specifically relate to cloud services
This standard provides controls and implementation guidance for both cloud service providers (like Google) and our cloud service customers.
ISO27018 — relates to the protection of personally identifiable information (PII), and as such, deals with one of the most critical components of the cloud — privacy. This standard is primarily focused on security controls for public-cloud service providers acting as PII processors. ISO 27018 works in two ways:
Builds off of existing ISO 27002 controls with specific items for cloud privacy
Provides completely new security controls for personal data
SOC 2 — evaluates an organization’s information systems relevant to security, availability, processing integrity, and confidentiality or privacy.
SOC 3 — a report based on the existing SysTrust and WebTrust principles.
In addition to having separated exchange and internal operation functions, ExCraft has added even more security through CloudFlare’s services; this gives us a robust firewall, equipped with packet inspection, intrusion detection, and other preventative systems. Even with separated resources and traditional site security measures in place, ExCraft still uses a designated monitoring and response team to ensure the exchange continues to run smoothly.
Platform
ExCraft is what we call a “Cloud-native” exchange. Within the ExCraft Cloud, we have separated core exchange functions into secure microservice containers that loosely couple Google’s Cloud. Docker containers with custom coded-solutions in several different computer languages (Go, Python, C++, and C- -) are connected using an Istio Service Mesh by Google Remote Procedural Call (gRPC) and orchestrated through Kubernetes. Each microservice scales with high availability, clustering to achieve low latency, and high throughput all at the lowest possible management costs
By deploying these containers as a Google Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), ExCraft attains greater scalability than existing CEXs. Google’s Compute Engine allows load balancing for resource distribution across several regions as well as smart autoscaling, which can divert spikes in traffic. Multiload balancing and smart autoscaling also tie into the preventative measures we have available against DoS attacks; this means ExCraft can handle over 10 million requests per second without any preparation (prewarming).
On top of scalability and throughput, Google’s VPC makes sure that data is stored securely with privacy safeguards, and that communication between our services, as well as users, are assured privately over the internet. All transmitted information not controlled by the Google platform requires encryption, authentication and is checked for integrity at one or more layers to guarantee that data sent reaches its destination unaltered.
Finally, Google’s Cloud services make it easier to set a Disaster Recovery plan based on recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO), thus significantly reducing even more costs in comparison to traditional recovery plans. Non-traditional Disaster Recovery plans coupled with our DevOps team working around the clock on patches, upgrades, and new functionality (see our Roadmap) means that ExCraft has prepared for the worst case scenario.
Operations
Operations are the most crucial aspect of an exchange, which we have the most control over. If you remember the table with all of the lost funds due to exchange hacks and exploits mentioned in An Introduction to the Security Behind ExCraft, you would have noticed how many have succumbed to not having enough security measures built amongst their employees. For example, look at the number of susceptible cold wallet hacks; this is a critical operational problem. ExCraft keeps our multi-sig cold wallet with the minimum liquidity necessary (<5%) for trading while promoting highest safety. All measures have been taken to prevent these and any other funds from security breaches.
The ExCraft team has received mandatory training on security practices and handling personally identifiable information (PII) for out KYC processes. We take pride that our staff is aware of the most common type of types of phishing attempts such as fake Telegram groups, Twitter giveaways, and QR code malware. We have also taken measures to acquire as many domains similar to our official ExCraft.com website to prevent potential phishing attacks. ExCraft is very selective about the levels of access given to our team members. Mandatory 2FA, password complexity, rotation, lockouts, and audit reviews on all critical services are implemented across the board internally.
Compliance and Finance
To ensure compliance, which we alluded to in our external risk management article, ExCraft will routinely go through scheduled and unscheduled audits with vulnerability testing and penetration testing. Key metrics and requirements will be automated as they are with most major exchanges. With these, we hope to achieve the highest levels of transparency with our community.
In promoting our financial security, customer funds are maintained separately from operational funds. Operational reserves are kept in full, meaning no borrowing. Rest well knowing we do not margin trade with our users’ funds.
We hope that this has been an educational and worthwhile read for our community. The ExCraft team wants to build trust with our growing community and highlight what makes us stand out from other major exchanges. Continue to follow us on our social media channels for more content like this and other updates, which will be coming out shortly!
ExCraft Exchange (Website)：https://www.excraft.com
ExCraft Telegram (English)：https://t.me/ExCraftExchangeENG
ExCraft Telegram (Chinese)：https://t.me/ExCraftExchangeCN
ExCraft Telegram (Korean)：https://t.me/ExCraftExchangeKR
