Author: Michael Johnson

This following shows our current and planned expectations concerning maximum likely chain-reorganisation depth. We would not consider transactions within this depth to have an exceptionally high chance of being permanent. These are our own expectations only and do not constitute any sort of guarantee. They are derived from theoretical considerations, ongoing empirical data, human factors in contingency planning and the past experience of our security team. As with all things in the peer-to-peer space the risk is entirely with the individual operator. In much the same way as many in the space, we will be monitoring the chain for any…

After a successful launch, Frontier passed it’s 100000th block earlier this week. Here are some interesting stats from these first blocks. The first 50 block times (in seconds): Right after genesis, it took 29 seconds for the second block to appear, then 31 and 29 seconds for the next couple of blocks. Not too surprising as the miners scrambled with their setups as the final genesis block became known. After these first blocks, we see the block time drop significantly at the onslaught of larger miners, flooring at 1 second that is the limit enforced by the consensus protocol. Let’s…

This alert is related to a consensus issue that occurred on the Frontier network at block 116,522, mined on 2015-08-20 at 14:59:16+02:00 – Issue has been fixed, see “Fix” below. Impact: High Issue description: State database consensus issue in geth with deletion of account data, which could happen during SUICIDE instructions. Affected implementations: All geth implementations up to and including versions 1.0.1, 1.1.0 and develop (“unstable 1.1.0”) were affected. Eth (C++) and pyethereum (Python) are unaffected. Effects on expected chain reorganisation depth: Increase waiting time for eventual block confirmation to 12 hours Proposed temporary workaround: Miners switch to eth or pyethereum asap…

ETH DEV would like to thank everyone for their participation in the Olympic test network, which helped us greatly in stress testing, optimization, and finding bugs in the Ethereum clients, as well as determining what the limits of the current Ethereum system are. To that end, we are pleased to announce the Olympic reward recipients. On top of the rewards announced below, every miner who mined a block in the Olympic chain with block number in the range [310000, 589999] is entitled to receive 0.5 ETH per block, and every miner who mined a block in the Olympic chain with…

An increasing number of proposed applications on top of Ethereum rely on some kind of incentivized, multi-party data provision – whether voting, random number collection, or other use cases where getting information from multiple parties to increase decentralization is highly desirable, but also where there is a strong risk of collusion. A RANDAO can certainly provide random numbers with much higher cryptoeconomic security than simple block hashes – and certainly better than deterministic algorithms with publicly knowable seeds, but it is not infinitely collusion-proof: if 100% of participants in a RANDAO collude with each other, they can set the result…

Insecurely configured Ethereum clients with no firewall and unlocked accounts can lead to funds being accessed remotely by attackers. Affected configurations: Issue reported for Geth, though all implementations incl. C++ and Python can in principle display this behavior if used insecurely; only for nodes which leave the JSON-RPC port open to an attacker (this precludes most nodes on internal networks behind NAT), bind the interface to a public IP, and simultaneously leave accounts unlocked at startup. Likelihood: Low Severity: High Impact: Loss of funds related to wallets imported or generated in clients Details: It’s come to our attention that some…

Unfortunately we were not able to secure the venue for devcon one in London on the dates desired (October 5th-8th). As a consequence we are postponing the event until further notice.  Please do not make travel plans at this time. Updates will be forthcoming on the devcon one website . Please standby for further information. Source link

State transition and consensus issue in geth client causes panic (crash) when processing a (valid) block with a specific combination of transactions, which may cause overall network instability if block is accepted and relayed by unaffected clients thus causing a DoS. This may happen in a block that contains transactions which suicide to the block reward address. Affected configurations: Issue reported for Geth.While investigating the issue, related issues were discovered and corrected in pyethereum, hence pyethapp is also affected. C++ clients are unaffected. Likelihood: Low Severity: High Complexity: High Impact: Network Instability and DoS Details: A block containing a specific…

Implementation bug in the go client leads to steady increase of difficulty independent of hashing power. Affected configurations: All Go client versions v1.0.x, v1.1.x, release and develop branches. The bug was introduced in a recent update and release through commit https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/commit/7324176f702a77fc331bf16a968d2eb4bccce021 which went into the affected client versions. All miners running earlier mentioned versions are affected and are advised to update as soon as possible. Likelihood: High Severity: Medium Impact: Increase in block time will lead to an exponential increase in difficulty Details: A bug in the go client leads to steady increase in difficulty in the following block, as…

To the wonderful Ethereum Community, You often heard me say at conferences that Ethereum was not a company, a foundation, an implementation, or an individual. Ethereum is both an idea and an ideal, encompassing the first censorship-resistant network build specifically to enable those who need it the most to safely trade, privately self-organise and freely communicate, rather than relying on the crippled walled garden handed out by the powers that be. Due to divergence in personal values, Eth/Dev and I have mutually decided to part ways. I of course intend to continue promoting the Ethereum ideals and bring about a…