Ethereum: Parity Tech uncovers critical consensus bug

Eren Sengezer FXStreet

Parity Tech, the developer of the widely-used software that allows a secure interaction with the Ethereum blockchain, has recently published a report revealing a critical bug.

"A consensus issue on the public test network Ropsten has revealed a consensus vulnerability that can be triggered by a malformed transaction," the report's summary read and provided the below-seen explanation:

"Examining the issues with our nodes on Ropsten, we have found out that there is a potential consensus-related issue between Parity Ethereum (up to versions 1.10.4-stable and 1.11.1-beta) and all other Ethereum clients."

"In the worst case, submitting a certain malformed transaction (coming from a 0xfff...fff address) to a mining Parity Ethereum node could have caused that node to produce a malformed block, which would still be treated as valid by other affected Parity Ethereum nodes."

Despite that critical issue, however, Parity Tech was able to quickly publish an update with a fix. As of writing, the ETH/USD pair was trading at $610, adding a little over 3% on the day.

Author

Eren Sengezer

FXStreet

As an economist at heart, Eren Sengezer specializes in the assessment of the short-term and long-term impacts of macroeconomic data, central bank policies and political developments on financial assets.

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