A major infrastructure bug in Ethereum’s Geth client has been exploited, affecting over 50% of miners on Ethereum and other blockchains compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which was forked over the weekend.
The developers of Ethereum (ETH) acted quickly to release a new version of the Ethereum Geth client after noticing an infrastructure bug present in the code that forked the network over the weekend. Marius van der Wijden, developer of Ethereum and the Go Ethereum client, also known as Geth, explained that the network's client had been exploited by an attacker who took advantage of the existing vulnerability.
The bug described by the developer affected miners running v1.10.7 or older of the Geth client. As shown in the data According to Ethernode, about 74,3% of Ethereum miners run this client, so a significant number of miners connected to the network were running with the infrastructure bug detected in the network's outdated client. At the time of the exploit, the Ethereum network forked, giving rise to a new blockchain.
As an explained Wijden on his Twitter account, luckily Infura, the largest Ethereum infrastructure provider, the exchanges and most of the mining pools and miners were on the longest chain of the network, so the impact of the fork was not severe. Beiko Team, another of the most well-known Ethereum developers in the crypto space, reported at the time of the exploit that miners from Binance Pool, Flexpool, and BTC.com were the ones on the wrong blockchain, but that they were already being contacted to update to the new version of the client as soon as possible.
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Ethereum consensus failure
The exploited bug in the Geth client software caused a new fork in Ethereum, one of the most used blockchain networks in the world. The fork or separation of the blockchain occurs when a version of the network is no longer compatible with its previous versions, forcing miners to choose between one version or another; which results in the separation of the network into two parts. When these separations occur accidentally or unscheduled, they can lead to one of the most serious problems of blockchain technology: the double-spending.
In November last year, Ethereum experienced a similar hard fork, which was caused by the lack of Geth updates in its software. At that time, the network forked, causing the interruption of service in the Ethereum API. Nikita ZhavoronkovBlockchair developer Zhavoronkov called the bug one of the most serious seen on Ethereum since The DAO exploit in 2016. According to Zhavoronkov, the hard fork occurred “without warning,” revealing a serious bug in the mainnet consensus.
However, in the new fork, several analysts and blockchain experts agree that, although the bug could have led to a serious problem, the reality is that it did not and its impact on the network was small. Also, several developers they recommended to users who, for security reasons, will wait a reasonable amount of time before making transactions on the network again.
Several EVM blockchains affected
In addition to Ethereum, the infrastructure bug was also exploited on other networks. block chains compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The chains affected by the error were the Huobi ECO Chain y Binance Smart Chain (BSC); in both, the developers released new updates to the Geth client to fix the bug and protect the network. report An audit of Telos EVM exposed the bug in the Ethereum virtual machine code last Tuesday.
At press time, there are no reports of Ethereum’s second-layer network Polygon being affected by the mainchain consensus bug. On the other hand, nearly 2.000 Ethereum nodes on the Geth client, or about 49%, are already running the newest version of the Geth client, v1.10.8; while the rest of the miners are still running older versions.
Source: Ethernode
The ETH price at the time of this edition is $3.190 per unit, with a market capitalization of $374.370 billion.
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