Ever since Bitcoin was created in 2008, it is known as the most secure and hard to hack blockchain. Anyway, each brilliant idea has its cons and here is comes to the Bitcoin Core wallet. This article is going to lead you through the process’ timeline – from the discovery of the particular vulnerability in March last year to the final solution of Bitcoin’s developers, which came up this week. Stay tuned – keep reading.
DDoS vulnerability on board
Let’s start with the basic. DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack brings down the blockchain by simply overflowing nodes with traffic. As a matter of fact, miners are duplicating transactions, which over-use the network’s bandwidth. Therefore, it crashes when trying to validate all the requests. It’s more or less a bug in the consensus code. The current issue, registered as CVE-2018-17144 is willing to cause potentially damages to the nodes, which run software versions between 0.14.0 and 0.16.2. A DDoS attack would cost miners about 12.5 BTC, which is around $80 000 to spend to successfully perform it. Isn’t cheap at all, right?
Bitcoin’s team solution
Ultimately, the bug was fixed, but there are still some risks. The most likely to occur one is a chain split, where transactions would be able to reverse after they’re confirmed. How did they solve the threat? They asked all the users with potentially harmed version of the software to upgrade their program as soon as possible. Actually, this makes a lot of sense – each node should implement the fix, this way the network will heal itself organically, without the need of any undertaken actions. Often called a “patch”, updating the client is the ultimate recommendation to consider at the moment.
Extra fixes
Updating to the latest version will take between 5 and 30 minutes – depends on your PC’s processing power. In fact, the upgraded software is about to come with some additional fixes for the less-significant bugs – RPC, also other APIs, error flags considered invalid and of course, some documentation precisions.
Bottom line
Such crisis causes collapses in the coin’s price and also the users’ interest toward it. This kind of vulnerabilities are able to put at risk not only the Bitcoin’s market, but also collapse the market’s capitalization in general. In brief, always make some time to check the social media and networking of the coin you’re handling with. This way you might have the chance to get informed on time and react to the changes in real time.