EF Blog

ETH top background starting image
ETH bottom background ending image
Skip to content

Security Alert – [Implementation bug in Go clients causing increase in difficulty – Fixed – Miners check and update Go clients]

Posted by Jutta Steiner on September 3, 2015

Security Alert – [Implementation bug in Go clients causing increase in difficulty – Fixed – Miners check and update Go clients]

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 timestamp in new block = timestamp + 1 of old block, regardless of the actual time, when mining. This leads to an increase in the difficulty independently of the hashing power

Effects on expected chain reorganisation depth: None

Proposed temporary workaround: None

Remedial action taken by Ethereum: Provision of hotfixes as below:

If using the PPA: sudo apt-get update then sudo apt-get upgrade

If using brew: brew update then brew reinstall ethereum

If using a windows binary: download the updated binary from the release page

If you are building from source: git pull followed by make geth (please use the Master branch 587669215b878566c4a7b91fbf88a6fd2ec4f46a)

Stay Updated

Subscribe to get email notifications about the topics you care about. Choose from research, events, security updates, and more.


Categories