Security contest vs traditional audit: what is the difference?

An audit gives you the attention of the firm you hired, for as long as you booked them. A contest gives you a wide network of security researchers working in parallel, each incentivised to find what the others missed.

That network is not unanchored. Two Lead Guards are matched to your protocol, so there is a named, senior pair accountable for depth of coverage, not only a crowd.

Judging runs in two passes. The community judges first. Submissions then go to dual judging, split into two batches, one for each Lead Judge, who assesses the validity and severity of the findings in their batch.

The two Lead Judges then review each other's judgements and escalate anything they disagree on. By the time a finding is settled it has been through the community and both Lead Judges, so none rests on a single opinion, and a disagreement is surfaced rather than settled quietly.

Audit pricing is a function of time booked. In a contest, researchers earn rewards for verified, exploitable findings, judged on impact, so you spend on outcomes, not hours.

The common objection to open competition is volume. Two mechanisms hold it down.

First, an AutoGuard round runs before the guard contest, where AI agents and static analyzers compete for 10% of the prize pool and surface issues first, so what automation can find is already on the table before the researchers arrive.

Second, during the guard contest itself, every submission carries a fee. Firing off generated findings in bulk costs the sender on each one, which holds the volume down at the point of submission rather than filtering it afterwards.

Findings ship with reproduction steps, severity, and a remediation path: a plan, not a wall of comments. A Mitigation Review then checks the fixes: Lead Guards who finish in the top-10 join it, along with any guards who outrank them and finish inside the top-10.