Greater than 280 blockchains vulnerable to ‘zero-day’ exploits, warns safety agency

by Jeremy

280 or extra blockchain networks are estimated to be vulnerable to “zero-day” exploits that might put not less than $25 billion value of crypto in danger, in response to cybersecurity agency Halborn.

In a Mar. 13 weblog, Halborn warned of the vulnerability it dubbed “Rab13s” — including it has already labored with some blockchains, akin to Dogecoin, Litecoin and Zcash, to institute a repair for it.

Halborn was contracted by Dogecoin in March 2022 to conduct a safety assessment of its codebase and located “a number of vital and exploitable vulnerabilities.”

It later decided these identical vulnerabilities “affected over 280 different networks” that risked billions of {dollars} value of cryptocurrencies.

Halborn outlined three vulnerabilities, the “most crucial” of which permits an attacker to “ship crafted malicious consensus messages to particular person nodes, inflicting every to close down.”

It added these messages over time might expose the blockchain to a 51% assault the place an attacker controls the vast majority of the community’s mining hash charge or staked tokens to make a brand new model of the blockchain or take it offline.

Different zero-day vulnerabilities it discovered would permit potential attackers to crash blockchain nodes by sending Distant Process Name (RPC) requests — a protocol permitting a program to speak and request companies from one other.

It added the probability of RPC-related exploits was decrease because it requires legitimate credentials to undertake the assault.

“Resulting from codebase variations between the networks not all of the vulnerabilities are exploitable on all of the networks, however not less than considered one of them could also be exploitable on every community,” Halborn warned.

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The agency mentioned right now it’s not releasing additional technical particulars of the exploits as a consequence of their severity and added it made a “good religion effort” to contact all affected events to reveal the potential exploits and supply remediation for the vulnerabilities.

Dogecoin, Zcash and Litecoin have already carried out patches for the found vulnerabilities, however a whole lot might nonetheless be uncovered in response to Halborn.