AI agents help rescue ETH’s Glamsterdam fork, ‘Steal My Bitcoin’ site: Hodler’s Digest
Ethereum's Glamsterdam hard fork testnet was canceled this week after ChainSecurity discovered critical vulnerabilities in two gas scaling improvement proposals.
The second and final testnet for Ethereum's Glamsterdam hard fork was canceled this week after ChainSecurity discovered vulnerabilities in two gas scaling Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP-8037/8038). These flaws could have compromised at least 13 DeFi contracts, potentially allowing attackers to exploit the resulting vulnerabilities.
The hard fork testnet dress rehearsal on Hoodi will not be rescheduled until all second-order effects of the fork have been properly analyzed. In a post on X, Derek Chiang from Eth Labs noted the vulnerability was discovered just minutes before the scheduled test, causing significant disruption.
AI Agents Coordinate Response
Researchers from Eth Labs and the Ethereum Foundation independently deployed AI agents to scan contracts for vulnerabilities. When they discovered both teams were using similar strategies, they set up a message board via GitHub to coordinate their efforts.
In the future, protocol designers would do well to conduct much more thorough analysis of potential breakages that their update might introduce, and to do so much earlier in the process.
Chiang noted the similarities to the OpenAI <> Hugging Face hack where rogue agents coordinated attacks, suggesting the same pattern could be useful for defensive purposes. The initiative has been so successful that a second board has been established to examine EIP-8198, or 'Quick Slots,' proposed for the subsequent Hegota hard fork.
Bitcoin Security Demonstration
A new website called 'Steal My Bitcoin' has been launched to demonstrate Bitcoin's resilience against the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities, which caused widespread concern this year. The site contains a Bitcoin wallet worth approximately $2,000, with the key accessible through a binary called print-flag.
As of now, the site has remained operational for 25 hours without a successful hack, though it has experienced periodic downtime due to heavy traffic and probing attempts. PHP is a programming language widely used to power websites and web applications, and the vulnerabilities led government agencies in several countries to take critical websites offline as a precaution.
Blockchain Developments
Solana's first major consensus upgrade, Alpenglow, went live on mainnet on Wednesday. The upgrade has reduced transaction finalization time from approximately 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds. While DeFi activity has remained flat or slightly decreased following the upgrade, it's still early days for the implementation.
StarkNet's community has voted to support research into becoming an independent, post-quantum layer-1 blockchain. The governance vote, which ran for seven days, received 93.52% approval from about 3,200 votes. StarkNet saw its value fall by 24.9% this week, the biggest decline among the top 100 cryptocurrencies.
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