Severe Bug Was Found In Ethereum And ETC Core Library

A severe bug was found in Ethereum and ETC core library as the mining pool found the vulnerability code that was used for both of them but now it has been fixed so let’s read more on it in the latest ethereum news.

The mining pool discovered a vulnerability that affected both Ethereum and Ethereum Classic blockchains. Some of the network nodes were not able to update their data because of the bug as the mining pool said. However, a solution was recently implemented on the blockchains.

Great news. Our pull request has been successfully merged into the Ethereum code.https://t.co/816Hckk8zS

January 1st has been saved 😉 ETH mining won't have this lib problem. Read more:https://t.co/oMlDkipQBJ

— 2Miners (@pool2miners) November 12, 2020

The mining pool 2Miners discovered a severe bug affecting Ethereum’s epoch switch which is a term used to describe when the network moves from a set of filled blocks to a new unfilled set according to a new blog post. The bug also affected Ethereum Classic which is a hard fork of Ethereum. Blockchains are highly complex structures that depend on several moving parts in order to operate seamlessly. This means that any upgrade or new development can bring unforeseen consequences which are usually accounted for but they can still miss the chance. The upcoming fork on ETC or the ECIP 1099 proposal which cut down on the hashing power on ethereum, caused the problem this time.

Attention ETC Miners!

Today ETC has switched to the 385 epoch.
All the miners have started to send up to 40% rejected shares to the pool.

We've solved the issue together with lolMiner devs.
If you use 2Miners your shares would not be rejected anymore.https://t.co/ILxu7RVcSo pic.twitter.com/lWCLJ3bVrl

— 2Miners (@pool2miners) November 6, 2020

2Miners found that once the blockchain switched to a new epoch, the mining pools didn’t validate the data and they found a severe bug to be in the core library used for maintaining both ETH and ETC:

“With thorough investigation, we have discovered that the math in one of the core libraries used in many Ethash-based cryptocurrencies is a little off.”

The company explained that the code was using calculation values of 32 bits rather than the required 64 bits. The issue could have caused some nodes and servers to accept the new data to the blockchain but some other nodes to not which could have created a potentially drastic situation that could lead to another chain split. The developers estimated that the problem will likely happen on January 1 for the ETH blockchain but that it was already an issue for ETC. 2miners identified and patched the issue for both blockchains and worked with ETC developers as well:

“Thanks for this. We are running a few sync tests and general otherwise sanity checks, but in general this looks good and unless we find something unexpected we’ll have it merged very soon.”

On Ethereum’s side, the mining company released two requests to mitigate the issue. On their blog post you can read that the users were encouraged to download a patch for both blockchains.