Dormant Bug Briefly Split The Ethereum Blockchain Today: Report

A dormant bug has briefly split the Ethereum blockchain today and caused certain nodes that were not upgraded to split so here’s what exactly happened as we find out in our ethereum news.

The dormant bug affected some of the nodes on the ETH blockchain. The nodes were using an implementation of Ethereum and hadn’t upgraded to the latest version and one of the biggest infrastructure providers was affected which led to causing issues for various projects. The Ethereum blockchain split today shortly caused by a dormant bug which led been partially fixed as the issues were largely resolved but questions remain over the handling of the fix.

haha you think I'd be worried about ETH today because devs sneak-pushed a consensus critical bug fix that caused a chainsplit but you'd be wrong because I already sold all my ETH for $6 about 4 years ago on the day of the DAO hack! So jokes on you!

— Eric Wall (@ercwl) November 11, 2020

The bug caused plenty of chaos because it affected the Ethereum infrastructure provider Infura. When the service went down citing a major issue since many services that use Infura were unable to interact with the ETH blockchain. Many other nodes were affected as well. According to Peter Szilagyi, the team leads at the Ethereum Foundation, the bug was lying dormant for two years. John Youngseok Yang, the Ph.D. student of Software Platform Lab, noticed the bug and received 20,000 points for finding two serious vulnerabilities. The bug affected a version of the ETH blockchain named Go-Ethereum or Geth.

Ethereum-dependent services are facing outages following the recent chain split. ETH withdrawals from Nash trading channels are currently failing, but we’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

— Nash (@nashsocial) November 11, 2020

Ethereum developers introduced a fix and many nods were protected but the developers didn’t reveal the details of the bug in order to prevent a bad actor from exploring it. What went wrong is that some of the nodes were not upgraded. Infura was running a version of GEth 1.9.9 which was released on December 6, 2019. The blockchain, therefore, split into a longer version and a shorter version.  Nikita Zhavoronkov, ETH lead developer said:

 “The issue is that at some point some change to the code was introduced that led to a split between those who have upgraded and those who have not.”

Binance runs its own Ethereum node observed the split and closed withdrawals from the exchange. Blockchain, an ETH block developer was also affected and the data was then showing blocks from the similar blockchain:

 “Ethereum-dependent services are facing outages following the recent chain split. ETH withdrawals from Nash trading channels are currently failing, but we’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”