New Vulnerability May Prevent Ethereum Soft Fork
The number of options available to the ethereum development community as it searches for a way to recover investor funds lost when The DAO was compromised is dwindling with news that a vulnerability in one of the more prominent solutions has been discovered. As it turns out, a soft fork that would have sought to blacklist the ether address that holds the confiscated funds, preventing it from conducting any transactions, actually exposes a previously undetected attack vector. In a post on the Ethereum Foundation blog, developer Felix Lange explains that the exploit would slow down mining....
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The DAO debacle continues, after the miner community voted in favor of a protocol soft fork, a new vulnerability introduced by the update has caused the support to the fork to be withdrawn. Geth's 1.4.8 version could allow an attacker to SPAM and effectively freeze the whole Ethereum network. The Ethereum Foundation has introduced a new Geth client version (1.4.9) that rolls back the changes made in the previous soft-fork-enabled software. A security alert was issued by Ethereum Foundation. In the announcement, the developer Felix Lange explained: An attack vector has been identified in....
The Ethereum community has a lot to decide lately as the network has been preparing for an upcoming soft fork expected to start roughly around June 30. According to Etherchain.org pools who have implemented the soft fork are showing consensus for the procedure. With the Ethereum community planning on the next step another revelation from Hacking, Distributed shows the soft fork may be vulnerable to DoSing. Is a Blacklisting Soft Fork a Good Idea? Some Say No. In an editorial written by Tjaden Hess and additional research done by River Keefer, and Emin Gün Sirer the Hacking, Distributed....
With $250 million on the line, Ethereum is moving at lightspeed as the latest unsybilable miner voting shows they almost unanimously back the fork, with more than 90% in favor. Gavin Wood, founder of Ethcore, the company that develops Parity, one of Ethereum’s clients, confirmed the soft-fork has been merged stating: “[T]he development branch of the Parity codebase now includes some functionality to allow miners to block certain transactions.” The softfork is still waiting to be merged in Go, the Ethereum client used by most users. Jeffrey Wilcke, an ethereum founder and lead developer of....
A lot of people are expressing their concern over the Ethereum fork idea. Decision-making of such proportions should be left to the community, rather than a handful of developers. The Ethereum ecosystem is still in a state of flux after the attacks against The DAO. It has become apparent the goal is to execute either a soft or hard fork to resolve this situation. But Peter Todd argues that forking is not the right way to solve this situation. A lot of people still seem to confuse The DAO with Ethereum and vice versa. The DAO is a project on top of the Ethereum platform, and Ether is the....
The DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization built on the Ethereum blockchain, has been the subject of a continued hack today that has seen the theft of over 3.5 million Ether, which was valued at more than $50 million at the time of the heist. The DAO was created as a utopian decentralized venture capital-style smart contract, enabling individuals to gain voting shares in exchange for the virtual currency Ether. Naturally, the fund has attracted huge attention in the digital currency world, with more individuals jumping on board, raising more than $150 million worth of Ether during....