Summary: In some situations, variables can overwrite other variables in storage. Affected Solidity compiler versions: 0.1.6 to 0.4.3 (including 0.4.4 pre-release versions) Detailed description: Storage variables that are smaller than 256 bits are packed together into the same 256 bit slot if they can fit. If a value larger than what is allowed by the type is assigned to the first variable, that value will overwrite the second variable. This means if an attacker can cause an overflow in the...

One of the important indicators of how much load the Ethereum blockchain can safely handle is how the uncle rate responds to the gas usage of a transaction. In all blockchains of the Satoshian proof-of-work variety, any block that is published has the risk of howbecoming a “stale”, ie. not being part of the main chain, because another miner published a competing block before the recently published block reached them, leading to a situation where there is a “race” between...

Mist leaks some low level APIs, which Dapps could use to gain access to the computer’s file system and read/delete files. This would only affect you if you navigate to an untrusted Dapp that knows about these vulnerabilities and specifically tries to attack users. Upgrading Mist is highly recommended to prevent exposure to attacks. Affected configurations: All versions of Mist from 0.8.6 and lower. This vulnerability doesn’t affect the Ethereum Wallet since it can’t load external DApps. Likelihood: Medium Severity: High Summary Some...

The Ethereum network will be undergoing a hard fork at block number 2463000, which will likely occur between 12:00 and 13:00 UTC on Tuesday, October 18, 2016. A countdown timer can be seen at https://fork.codetract.io/.

During the last couple of weeks, the Ethereum network has been the target of a sustained attack. The attacker(s) have been very crafty in locating vulnerabilities in the client implementations as well as the protocol specification. While the recent patches have led to an overall increased resiliency in the client implementations, the attacks have also demonstrated that a lower-level change to the EVM pricing model is needed. For many users, the most visible consequence is probably that they are having...

Today the network was attacked by a transaction spam attack that repeatedly called the EXTCODESIZE opcode (see trace sample here), thereby creating blocks that take up to ~20-60 seconds to validate due to the ~50,000 disk fetches needed to process the transaction. The result of this was a ~2-3x reduction in the rate of block creation while the attack was taking place; there was NO consensus failure (ie. network fork) and neither the network nor any client at any point...

URGENT ALL MINERS: The network is under attack. The attack is a computational DDoS, ie. miners and nodes need to spend a very long time processing some blocks. This is due to the EXTCODESIZE opcode, which has a fairly low gasprice but which requires nodes to read state information from disk; the attack transactions are calling this opcode roughly 50,000 times per block. The consequence of this is that the network is greatly slowing down, but there is NO consensus...

Security Alert Affected configurations: Geth Likelihood: High Severity: High Summary: geth nodes running out of memory and crashing on block https://etherchain.org/block/2283416 Details: TBD Solution: Geth 1.4.12 was released. Please update ASAP.

Today, I am delighted to announce that Yoichi Hirai (pirapira on github) is joining the Ethereum project as a formal verification engineer. He holds a PhD from the University of Tokyo on the topic of formalizing communicating parallel processes and created formal verification tools for Ethereum in his spare time. In his own words: I’m joining Ethereum as a formal verification engineer. My reasoning: formal verification makes sense as a profession only in a rare situation where the verification target...