Published
5 years ago on
September 21, 2018
“A denial-of-service vulnerability (CVE-2018-17144) exploitable by miners has been discovered in Bitcoin Core versions 0.14.0 up to 0.16.2. It is recommended to upgrade any of the vulnerable versions to 0.16.3 as soon as possible.â€The vulnerability found means that nodes operating on Bitcoin Core versions 0.14.0 through to 0.16.2 are left open to DDoS attacks that would have enough of an impact, they could bring the entire Bitcoin blockchain down. If this happened, the value of Bitcoin would crumble, a mass sell off would occur and to be honest, the entire project would be left in tatters. How come nobody implemented an attack? You’d think that a sneaky bunch of hackers may have discovered this prior to the Bitcoin Core developers, however there was a small catch in the attack. In order to actually send enough traffic to the node, the hackers would need to sacrifice around $80,000.00 worth of Bitcoin. There’s no way anybody could profit from this attack, therefore in this instance, what is quite a major vulnerability has been left alone. Bitcoin further proves a lack of decentralisation The beauty of decentralisation is that the product cannot be controlled or changed by a lone entity. However, it looks like with this vulnerability within the network, Bitcoin decentralisation is somewhat tainted. The simple fact one single person could have had the power to totally destroy the network proves that Bitcoin is not yet fully decentralised. Tie this in with the recent revelation that more than 50% of Bitcoins volume is held in just 1% of Bitcoin wallets and suddenly, decentralisation seems like an impossible goal for the first cryptocurrency. Either way, with the vulnerability now fixed, hopefully decentralisation is one step closer. Overall, this hack could have been absolutely devastating, thankfully though, things seem to have been repaired before any real damage could be done. The only victim here is the reputation of Bitcoin, sadly this one might hang around for a while too. References The Next Web
