Bitcoin Full Nodes Still Under Threat By Inflation Bug

Bitcoin full nodes, at least half of them are still under threat from the inflation bug that was discovered in September 2018. In the latest cryptocurrency news, we read the report by the bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr.

According to the report, 50 percent of the full nodes on the bitcoin network is running software versions of the bitcoin client that is in danger of the inflation bug. However, the percentage did drop from 60% to 54% but the threat is still pretty high. Over the past few days, some of the full nodes have been upgraded.

Back in 2018, the developers discovered the inflation bug which could allow miners to inflate the total BTC supply by spending up-spent transaction outputs for the same transactions. The developers kept it a secret and they secretly released a new version of the client. A piece of the report reads:

 “In order to encourage rapid upgrades, the decision was made to immediately patch and disclose the less serious Denial of Service vulnerability, concurrently with reaching out to miners, businesses, and other affected systems while delaying publication of the full issue to give times for systems to upgrade. On September 20th a post in a public forum reported the full impact and although it was quickly retracted the claim was further circulated.”

The inflation bug allows malicious attackers to crash the bitcoin full nodes that run on the 0.14x software version by making them spend the same UTXO twice. The objective is to crash as many nodes as possible and not necessarily inflate the supply. The update that aimed to solve the problem included features that allowed the malicious hackers to double spend the same UTXO in one transaction so the new bug update caused older software clients to recognize the double-spend transactions as valid and not stop them.

Dashjr made clear:

 “Everyone upgrading to a fixed full node.”

There is also a solution if the large portion of the miners reject the tainted block, the chain split could occur and the attack could be diminished. As reported in the coming altcoin news, when the value overflow incident happened, the developers solved it in under five hours. So, the solution exists and it has to be implemented.