2020-8-31 11:30 |
Dan Robinson, a research partner with the cryptocurrency investment firm, Paradigm, recently published a new warning about Ethereum (ETH). The warning pointed out a potential vulnerability to frontrunners, which could mean a lot of trouble for Ethereum’s system.
According to Robinson’s recent blog post, the flaw exists in the design of Ethereum’s mempools, or its set of unconfirmed transactions. Basically, it would be possible for arbitrage bots to keep an eye on transactions that are waiting to be confirmed, and try to exploit them before the confirmation process catches up to them.
How does it all work?The way this would work is relatively simple. Bots usually seek out specific transaction types by searching the mempool, such as DEX-related trades. Once they find them, they try to front-run them in accordance with a predetermined algorithm.
Simply put, they would find a worthy transaction, copy it, and replace the receiving address with their own. The transaction would then be processed before the original one, thus allowing the bot’s owner to profit.
Furthermore, frontrunners can also execute the transaction and copy internal transactions, generated by the execution trace. Robinson further managed to come up with a plan that would extract the money, collaborating on it with a team of engineers specializing in smart contracts. They even joined forces with some of Ethereum’s security experts.
The goal of their plan was to try and confuse the transaction, which would prevent the bots from detecting the connection to Uniswap spouse. Unfortunately, the plan was unsuccessful, and the frontrunners managed to get away with the money once again.
He concluded that, with the failure of this plan, there is no other solution right about now, and that miners should be particularly careful when transferring funds.
The post Paradigm researcher warns of a new Ethereum (ETH) vulnerability appeared first on Invezz.
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