Bounty: Explain the bitcoin bug to me
Today I read alot of noise about the bitcoin bug. I don't care as much about opinions that many people like to give, what I would like to see is a simple technical description of:
- what the bug is
- how an attack would work
- how it has been mitigated
So, in essence, I am looking for a simple technical description of this bug.
The first half off the video @fractalfreedom shared pretty much covered it. An analogy would be the Android bug allowed a hacker to hack your phone with SMS: https://thehackernews.com/2015/07/android-phone-hacking.html
You just send a specific kind of Tx to a node, then the node would crash. Any node that receive the message will crash. Since a crashed node won't be propagating the message anymore, the crash should stop there. So technically all the neighboring nodes of a miner should crash. The rest would be up for the blockchain rules. Alt-coins like Dash that use Bitcoin Core's code is also affected and they fixed everything few days ago: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/dash-core-0-12-3-3-release-announcement.40698
The bug doesn't do any other harm than crashing nodes AFAIK. The attack should come from a miner. It's basically an invalid Tx. Each node that receive this type of Tx crash.
This was mitigated by the affected coins releasing a new version of their Core software with a fix.
Yep this is what i gathered. Thx for the answer!
Looks like it was a bit more complicated then we were first told according to the new info Ivan had today.
You are talking about the inflation bug, right? I didn't know Evan made a video about it.
Ivan on Tech explains it here.
Allowed invalid transaction in a block to crash the receiving node.
Technical explanation I barely understand!
Watch Ivan.
New info today! Would have allowed miners to double spend. But it would be risky to do. Shows even bitcoin is not bulletproof. Any link to the new blockchain explorer that gives new visualization of coin life. Someone doing due diligence on bitcoin?
according to this article http://blogs.eltiempo.com/riclargo/2018/01/18/bitcoin-dos-errores-no-cometer/ hints that bitcoin makes the same mistake en la economia in the economy, not establish an investment in adequate value, that is, there must be an adequate equivalence between what one buys and what one earns and how the bitcoin is changed for the money of one's country the value in what one earns is not always equivalent to what one spend, the value equivalence in what is earned and consumed is fundamental to maintain and improve the value of an economy
Waiting for answers :)
I would like to know aswell
attack would have meant exploiting the way bitcoin transactions are confirmed through mining – the process of generating new units of the cryptocurrency by verifying transactions through complex mathematical puzzles.
"A denial-of-service vulnerability (CVE-2018-17144) exploitable by miners has been discovered in Bitcoin Core versions 0.14.0 up to 0.16.2," an anonymous developer wrote when disclosing the bug on Github."
Source: independent.co.uk
Thanks for making the this question. I want to know as well but don't have enough time
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nice post boss
The first bug everyone talked about was the ddos bug. Miners could write some funny transactions where one input is used multiple times.
Of course such a transaction is not valid and should be rejected by the nodes. But due to a bug in the code that transaction would simply crash the node. In that way large parts of the network could be switched offline.
While this bug is certainly annoying, the real problem was introduced one version of bitcoin core later. Now the nodes would no longer crash on these transactions, but incorrectly accept them as valid transaction. That would allow miners to double spend bitcoin, creating extra bitcoin on the fly. No more 21 million fixed bitcoins.
The bitcoin core team choose to put the focus on the former bug and then fix both bugs. Because there is no reason why a miner would actively want to trigger a network outage, while they might want to get some extra coins.
This worked well and no such transaction was propagated. Now the bug is fixed and going back would cause a hard fork.
We were actually came really close to some serious troubles for bitcoin. But it also shows that even in the most secure cryptocurrency there are flaws and further problems are to be expected. Lets hope they get solved as nicely as this fatal bug.