The Ethereum Foundation has released information on the network security vulnerability of the second largest cryptocurrency, which was eliminated with the Berlin update last month. It could lead to a complete network shutdown, and the cost of activating it was several thousand dollars.
The developers call the vulnerability a “well-known secret”, noting that once it was publicly disclosed by mistake. After the April hard fork, the threat level has dropped enough to be talked about in more detail and openly.
As the Ethereum Foundation explains, the state of the Ethereum blockchain is fixed using the so-called “prefix tree”, the branches of which become denser as the network grows, and each new account can be compared to a leaf. From the root of the tree to the leaf, there is a series of intermediate nodes. To find each such account, it takes 8-9 operations, each of which is associated with a call to the database. The low cost of such operations was fraught with the risk of DoS attacks.
Along with the growth of the Ethereum network, it was necessary to increase the cost of gas for tree access operations. This was done in October 2016 with the Ethereum EIP-150 Improvement Proposal, which significantly increased the cost of some operations and helped strengthen the security of the network. Another increase occurred in the Istanbul hard fork in December 2019 and the most recent one in Berlin.
In 2019, researchers carried out work during which they were convinced of the continued high vulnerability of Ethereum to DoS attacks. Subsequently, the developers introduced a mechanism for blockchain snapshots, which has already made it possible to reduce the effectiveness of attacks by 10 times, but this was not enough either. With the increase in the cost of some operations in Berlin, the effectiveness of attacks fell by 5 times, and together with images – by 50.
“Since the Berlin update has already been activated, and Geth nodes use snapshots by default, we consider the threat low enough to disclose full information about it,” adds the Ethereum Foundation.
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