An Ethereum developer says the latest Pectra improve of the Sepolia testnet bumped into errors, which was made worse after an attacker used an “edge case” to trigger the mining of empty blocks.
Pectra rolled out on its last testnet, Sepolia, at 7:29 am on March 5, however Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden mentioned in a March 8 put up that the workforce instantly began seeing error messages on their geth node and empty blocks being mined.
The error was as a result of the deposit contract triggered the flawed sort of occasion — a switch occasion as an alternative of a deposit, in keeping with Van der Wijden.
A repair was rolled out, however van der Wijden says they missed one edge case, and an unknown consumer exploited it by sending a 0-token switch to the deposit deal with, which triggered the error once more.
“After a couple of minutes we noticed a number of empty blocks once more, so we regarded once more into the transaction swimming pools and located one other offending transaction that triggered the identical edge instances,” he mentioned.
Supply: Marius van der Wijden
“First we thought that somebody from the trusted validators has made a mistake, however we shortly realized that this transaction originated from a brand new account just lately funded by the tap.”
The ERC-20 normal doesn’t forbid a zero token switch; this enables anybody, even when they don’t personal any tokens, to switch to a different deal with, which the unknown consumer realized, van der Wijden mentioned.
“The one technique to cease the assault could be to filter out all transactions that work together with the deposit contract. So we made the next non-public repair, which we deployed to some of the DevOps nodes.”
“We suspected that the attacker was studying a few of our chats, so we determined to not publicize the repair, however solely replace just a few nodes that we managed in an effort to get extra full blocks on the community,” he added.
Supply: Marius van der Wijden
By 2 pm, all of the nodes had been up to date with the repair, and the unknown consumer transaction was mined efficiently.
Van der Wijden mentioned they by no means misplaced finalization throughout the incident, and the difficulty was remoted to Sepolia as a result of they have been utilizing a token-gated deposit contract as an alternative of the conventional mainnet deposit contract.
Beforehand, the builders examined the Pectra improve on the Holesky testnet on Feb. 26, which additionally encountered points.
Because of this, the builders have determined to postpone the Pectra improve till extra exams could be executed.
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