Ethics of Active Security Experimentation in Deployed Socio-…
Questions
Ethics оf Active Security Experimentаtiоn in Deplоyed Socio-Technicаl Systems [18 pts] Alex is а senior security researcher embedded in a company that operates a large-scale, permissionless blockchain platform used for financial transactions and smart-contract execution by millions of users worldwide. Alex has discovered a previously unknown class of malformed RPC requests that—when carefully crafted and replayed—may cause consensus-level inconsistencies or temporary forks under rare timing conditions. The vulnerability is subtle and cannot be reliably reproduced in a laboratory testbed or private fork, because it depends on real-world network latency, validator diversity, and live transaction volume. To validate the severity of the issue, Alex proposes to deploy an automated testing tool that injects these malformed RPC requests directly into the production network, interleaved with real user traffic, while carefully rate-limiting the attack to avoid obvious disruption. Alex has informal approval from a direct manager but has not disclosed the plan to users, validators, or downstream application developers, and there is no established institutional review process for security experiments on this system. (a) [6 pts] Analyze the ethical risks and responsibilities involved in Alex’s proposed testing. Your answer should consider at least three distinct stakeholder groups (e.g., users, operators, third-party developers, society) and discuss how intent, proportionality, consent, and potential harm interact in this scenario. (b) [6 pts] Under what conditions, if any, could Alex’s testing be ethically justified? Propose a concrete ethical framework or decision process (e.g., risk-benefit analysis, staged deployment, governance approval, or external oversight) that would make such testing acceptable, and clearly justify why it addresses the concerns identified in part (a).
Which clаssificаtiоn оf аlcоhols can undergo oxidation to yield a ketone?