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Crippling DDoS Vulnerability Put the Entire Bitcoin Market At Risk (thenextweb.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the impending-doom dept.

A major flaw was spotted in the Bitcoin network that could have allowed miners to bring down the entire blockchain by flooding full node operators with traffic, via a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. "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." the patch notes state. "It is recommended to upgrade any of the vulnerable versions to 0.16.3 as soon as possible." The Next Web reports: Developers have issued a patch for anyone running nodes, along with an appeal to update the software immediately. As far as the attack vector in question goes, there's a catch: anyone ballsy enough to try to bring down Bitcoin would have to sacrifice almost $80,000 worth of Bitcoin in order do it. The bug relates to its consensus code. It meant that some miners had the option to send transaction data twice, causing the Bitcoin network to crash when attempting to validate them. As such invalid blocks need to be mined anyway, only those willing to disregard block reward of 12.5BTC ($80,000) could actually do any real damage.

2 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Truth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Can we please just change the name of Bitcoin to CrimeCoin already? That's the only thing it's good for.

    Exactly. We could eliminate all but four coins, and use different ones for different specific purposes:
    - Drug Coin
    - Child Porn Coin
    - Money Laundering Coin
    - Ransomware Coin

  2. Re:Truth by nohup · · Score: 3, Informative

    What? That doesn't make any sense. The US Dollar is far better for crime and used a lot more than Bitcoin for crime. Bitcoin is trivially traceable and hard to spend unlike the dollar.

    Bitcoin has a lot of valid legitimate uses, such as cheap cross border payments, a hedge against inflation for countries like Venezuela and Argentina, a means of people without established banking sectors to transact, etc. It's also very useful in cases where there is risk of counter-party payment reversals in traditional systems, which lowers fees for such use cases. Another great potential future use is very small micropayments, possible future implementation for API calls without having to setup complex infrastructure and again, cross-border in countries where traditional banking systems don't operate or use different currencies. One novel current use where traditional systems fail is in rapidly purchasing a LARGE amount of anti-DOS capability in a hurry without counterparty risk. There are many new and novel uses. Here's one other small example: https://cointelegraph.com/news...