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Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

saurik.com

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Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#41

Post by AlexCoventry »

leppr wrote: post #24
SilasX wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! I got burned by Optimism in another way. They tell you to point your applications at etherscan.io for transaction data/history, but then, on November 11 last year, the pushed an update that deletes all transaction history up to that point, which you need for taxes! They swore they'd have the history restored on Etherscan by Nov 18th, but they still haven't. Only recently they pushed a workaround that lets you do…

If the history is completely gone, your government won't be able to find it either, so you can just fill in whatever you want to explain how balance A became balance B.

Of course it's not completely gone. Chain analysis companies, which tax authorities consult, will have backup copies.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#43

Post by null0pointer »

voldacar wrote: post #38
null0pointer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main issue with LN is even more fundamental than that. Their argument against other scaling solutions was basically "if we scale on chain the hardware requirements will be hard for regular people to keep up and decentralization will suffer". So instead they went about and created a system where only the wealthy have the capital to commit to open enough channels and route payments. LN is almost totally antithetica…

>Monero is technically superior to Bitcoin in basically every way I see how this is true from a privacy perspective, but how does monero solve the issue of the blockchain eventually becoming too large for an ordinary person to run a node on their pc? the bitcoin blockchain is already several hundred gigabytes

As I said, that's just my opinion really. But Monero uses a dynamic block size. The hardware requirements will increase of course. But hardware becomes cheaper over time so the monetary cost of participation does not increase as quickly as LN where the cost of participation is capital directly.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#44

Post by null0pointer »

kingo55 wrote: post #40
null0pointer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main issue with LN is even more fundamental than that. Their argument against other scaling solutions was basically "if we scale on chain the hardware requirements will be hard for regular people to keep up and decentralization will suffer". So instead they went about and created a system where only the wealthy have the capital to commit to open enough channels and route payments. LN is almost totally antithetica…

RE: Monero, I agree. One shortfall - how do we verify no one on the network has found and exploited an inflation bug?

Good question, I don't have an answer for you unfortunately. I have seen people talk about this in the Monero community though so at least they're aware of the issue.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#45

Post by DennisP »

iskander wrote: post #5

This is a concerning aspect of Ethereum's strategy to push scaling to layer-2 networks: Ethereum is a heavily audited and tested protocol that runs an extremely decentralized network of diverse clients. L2s can be...an AWS instance running arbitrary buggy code. Much of the confidence in the "base layer" that people using Ethereum currently experience will be significantly undermined if mundane transactions wend in an…

With zkrollups, you get an on-chain proof that the off-chain infrastructure did everything correctly. A contract can even verify that proof before updating the data on chain.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#46

Post by teempai »

iskander wrote: post #5

This is a concerning aspect of Ethereum's strategy to push scaling to layer-2 networks: Ethereum is a heavily audited and tested protocol that runs an extremely decentralized network of diverse clients. L2s can be...an AWS instance running arbitrary buggy code. Much of the confidence in the "base layer" that people using Ethereum currently experience will be significantly undermined if mundane transactions wend in an…

Ethereum actually has almost no client diversity. The vast majority of nodes run the geth client (go).

Regarding the security aspects of L2s: they will of course not be anywhere near as robust as ethereum itself, but over time they’ll get better. However, they also don’t need to be as robust as ethereum given they effectively benchmark against the ethereum chain so while things could go wrong, the amount of damage will be very contained and as the ethereum mainchain scales the damage radius becomes ever more contained. Finally the bridges that are being implemented to move assets from ethereum to the L2s can implement emergency withdrawal mechanisms which allow users to get their assets out even if things go wrong.

Not perfect, but the tradeoff seems reasonable to me given the performance enhancement and the diversity of functionality that can be offered via many different environments.

Disclaimer: I’m quite possibly biased due to my company working on L2s.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#47

Post by rawtxapp »

gillesjacobs wrote: post #10
iskander wrote: post #5

This is a concerning aspect of Ethereum's strategy to push scaling to layer-2 networks: Ethereum is a heavily audited and tested protocol that runs an extremely decentralized network of diverse clients. L2s can be...an AWS instance running arbitrary buggy code. Much of the confidence in the "base layer" that people using Ethereum currently experience will be significantly undermined if mundane transactions wend in an…

That's an issue with all cryptocurrency infrastructure though: projects need to be proven to demonstrate robust value and it's probably one of the most adversarial spaces in software. History has shown that hacks and exploits of projects hurt the price of the native taken but do not really damage the long-term earned trust.

Exactly this, it's a very adversarial environment with huge stakes for those that can exploit it. Even projects that have been around for months, years can get exploited which is why I'd recommend waiting a long time before putting non-trivial amounts into any smart contract or crypto related projects.

That's also a big plus for Bitcoin, because it's been around the longest and because it's so much simpler than more complex chains like eth, it's as secure as it gets.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#49

Post by saurik »

runeks wrote: post #36
kristofferR wrote: post #33

This title is way underselling this. As far as I could gather from a quick googling, this is the largest single bug bounty payout in history.

Along with the bounty for this one: https://gerhard-wagner.medium.com/double-spending-bug-in-pol... (also $2M [1]) [1] https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/polygon-pays-out-record-2...

Ah, but, you see: this bounty was $2M...+42! (omg; I honestly hadn't noticed this o_O)

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#50

Post by sophrocyne »

teempai wrote: post #46
iskander wrote: post #5

This is a concerning aspect of Ethereum's strategy to push scaling to layer-2 networks: Ethereum is a heavily audited and tested protocol that runs an extremely decentralized network of diverse clients. L2s can be...an AWS instance running arbitrary buggy code. Much of the confidence in the "base layer" that people using Ethereum currently experience will be significantly undermined if mundane transactions wend in an…

Ethereum actually has almost no client diversity. The vast majority of nodes run the geth client (go). Regarding the security aspects of L2s: they will of course not be anywhere near as robust as ethereum itself, but over time they’ll get better. However, they also don’t need to be as robust as ethereum given they effectively benchmark against the ethereum chain so while things could go wrong, the amount of damage wi…

For those interested in data supporting diversity comment (~82% geth) - https://www.ethernodes.org/

Re: GP comment - From a "trust" perspective, there is a distinct difference to call out between the integrity of data on the platform, and the trustworthiness of the platform itself (i.e., the ability for centralized control of all data)

In an instance where an L2 is compromised, the potential impact is limited to the integrity of data that individual L2 was contributing to the overall platform.

Those transactions which demand absolute integrity will naturally tend to occur on L1, for this reason. Risk mitigation strategies will develop for those operating on L2 + bridged chains.

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