**Cornell Researchers Tackle DAO Voting Vulnerabilities**

A team from Cornell University, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, is diving into potential threats to decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Their focus? Preventing "dark" voting systems through smart contract bribery.

At the Science of Blockchain Conference, researcher Mahimna Kelkar discussed their new cryptographic concept, proofs of complete knowledge (CK). This aims to close gaps in current cryptographic methods that could allow bribery attacks on DAO voting protocols.

Bribery attacks exploit the lack of central authority in DAOs, offering financial incentives to sway votes. The researchers propose using trusted execution environments (TEEs) and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICS) to ensure tokenholders maintain control over their keys, preventing vote manipulation.

The research is still in the prototype stage but highlights a significant threat to DAOs and offers potential solutions to safeguard decentralized governance.