Tag: Ethereum Blog

During the last couple of weeks, the Ethereum network has been the target of a sustained attack. The attacker(s) have been very crafty in locating vulnerabilities in the client implementations as well as the protocol specification. While the recent patches have led to an overall increased resiliency in the client implementations, the attacks have also…

Today the network was attacked by a transaction spam attack that repeatedly called the EXTCODESIZE opcode (see trace sample here), thereby creating blocks that take up to ~20-60 seconds to validate due to the ~50,000 disk fetches needed to process the transaction. The result of this was a ~2-3x reduction in the rate of block…

URGENT ALL MINERS: The network is under attack. The attack is a computational DDoS, ie. miners and nodes need to spend a very long time processing some blocks. This is due to the EXTCODESIZE opcode, which has a fairly low gasprice but which requires nodes to read state information from disk; the attack transactions are…

Security Alert Affected configurations: Geth Likelihood: High Severity: High Summary: geth nodes running out of memory and crashing on block http://ift.tt/2cUzDIB Details: TBD Proposed solution: Switch to an alternative client until fix is provided: Parity implementation The post Security alert – All geth nodes crash due to an out of memory bug appeared first on…

The foundation has committed to support the community consensus on the admittedly difficult hard fork decision. Seeing the results of various metrics, including carbonvote, dapp and ecosystem infrastructure adoption, this means that we will focus our resources and attention on the chain which is now called ETH (ie. the fork chain). That said, we recognize…

The DAO soft-fork attempt was difficult. Not only did it turn out that we underestimated the side effects on the consensus protocol (i.e. DoS vulnerability), but we also managed to introduce a data race into the rushed implementation that was a ticking time bomb. It was not ideal, and even though averted at the last…

We would like to congratulate the Ethereum community on a successfully completed hard fork. Block 1920000 contained the execution of an irregular state change which transferred ~12 million ETH from the “Dark DAO” and “Whitehat DAO” contracts into the WithdrawDAO recovery contract. The fork itself took place smoothly, with roughly 85% of miners mining on…

Slock.it’s “The DAO” has been a hot topic as of late, both internally in the organisation as well as within our community. The Hard Fork is a delicate topic and the way we see it, no decision is the right one. As this is not a decision that can be made by the foundation or…

Ethereum is not meant to be a platform to build esoteric smart contract applications that require a STEM degree to understand, but it aims to be one pillar of a different architecture for applications on the world wide web. With this post we will try to elucidate how this can be done and give some…

Hey everyone, I spent some time with our Canadian friends in Toronto after presenting “Ethereum: The World Computer” at Blockchain Training Conference last month and I wanted to provide a quick update on some of the exciting happenings in the Ethereum dev ecosystem. Lots of things are brewing behinds the scenes, so let’s jump in!…