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153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack

etherscan.io

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Re: 153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack

#151

Post by grandalf »

finnh wrote: post #122
grandalf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really true. Nothing has to be perfect if there is insurance infrastructure. People should not use contracts they have no reason to trust. As a contract becomes more important it should be viewed/vetted/trusted by as many entities as possible. Users of the contract should pay an insurance fee that goes to the vetters, who promise to reimburse in case of unpredictable behavior. Yes, this means applying some meatsp…

Awesome idea, until an evil-or-just-buggy insurance contract robs its counterparties blind. We're basically in no true Scotsman territory here.

There is money to be made providing vetting services as well as insurance services. You could argue that all parties offering either of those services are 100% going to be fraudulent, but this only makes sense if you assume that there is more money to be made acting badly than by developing a legitimate reputation for being honest.

In a group of actors, trust is a good thing. It benefits everyone, and everyone has an incentive to foster its development.

In meatspace systems we rely on things like identity verification (id cards, green bar certs, fingerprints, retinal scans, etc.), reputation by affiliation (resumes, schools attended, firms worked for) and and testimonials from others we trust.

The key aspect of the above is that we don't have to trust any of those signals perfectly in order for it to be of some benefit. If I find out someone went to Harvard, is followed on Twitter by Marc Andreessen, has had five commits accepted by Linus, has a credit score of 675, uses Android, has bad breath, etc., I will take each of those signals as some indication of her credibility on various issues and formulate my meta-opinion about how/whether to trust her based on some heuristic.

When I order from a seller on Amazon with very few stars I take a similar risk, yet once in a while I do so. Some fraud is taking place on Amazon but on balance the system gets more trustworthy every day.

Re: 153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack

#152

Post by gus_massa »

greato wrote: post #85
earlz wrote: post #25

Here's the root error I believe: https://github.com/paritytech/parity/blob/master/js/src/cont... The initWallet function should have been marked internal, but was instead not marked. Unmarked functions default to public in Solidity, so anyone can call that function and reinitialize the wallet to be under their control

Does this mean ETC is compromised too?

This is not a problem in ETH [1]. It's a bug in one of the contracts written by Parity. Anyone that has (had) money in these specific contracts is in trouble. If you are not using these specific contracts, you are safe (for now).

ETH and ETC have the same underlying technology and language to write the contracts. So if someone writes a contract it can be used in both variants. The contract may check that it is in ETH or ETC (probably looking for the contract that was added during the fork) but I think very few contracts check this, so almost all contracts are usable in both chains.

So if it was possible to use the Parity contract in ETH, then it's very probable that it was also possible to use it in ETC.

To answer your question: Probably the same bug that was used to steal ETH can be exploited to steal ETC, if someone is using these contracts in the ETC chain. But it's not a problem in ETH or ETC [1].

[1] As other commenters noted, it's a very bad design flaw to make all function public by default. It's not an error, but it makes much easier to write buggy code.

Re: 153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack

#153

Post by [deleted] »

jacopofar2 wrote: post #98
dna_polymerase wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can literally feel how Ethereum changes the law. I mean, seriously, no need for lawyers anymore. On ethereum it's is simple: You got fucked, live with it. "Bad faith? It's the code, didn't you read it?"

Except for that DAO of last summer, in that case the law changed...

[deleted]

Re: 153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack

#154

Post by sillysaurus3 »

vkou wrote: post #80
joshschreuder wrote: post #52

Let's play hypotheticals. If you were the attacker and you now have the ETH in your wallet, how do you cash out without anyone identifying you and maximising your profits? Also has the attacker broken a law by exploiting a bug in the contract?

> If you were the attacker and you now have the ETH in your wallet, how do you cash out without anyone identifying you and maximising your profits? Exchange to BTC, mix it, exchange to USD. > Also has the attacker broken a law by exploiting a bug in the contract? There are no laws. Only contracts.

This won't work in the US. It's very hard to get USD out of Bitcoin. And then the IRS will want to know where you are suddenly getting a huge amount of money from.

You could use localbitcoins to offload one coin at a time on an as-needed basis. That'd be pretty sweet, and the IRS won't be able to know anything strange is happening if you avoid depositing your USD into a bank. But paying rent in all-cash is rather sketchy. I wonder if drug dealers deal with similar problems.

I don't know how plausible this is, but the localbitcoins route might also open you up to being kidnapped. You'd need some pretty decent opsec to avoid revealing that you have a massive amount of BTC you're trying to offload.

Re: 153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack

#156

Post by resf »

swsieber wrote: post #126
codewiz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is rolling back transactions that are clearly part of a robbery a bad thing?

Because it's rolling back transactions that were done under "the law" (e.g. the ether contract stuff) by human intervention when the entire draw of the ether contract stuff was the promise of no human intervention

In a blockchain, the participants in the network have unlimited authority to modify the "law" of the blockchain, even retroactively.

If there is sufficient consensus among Ethereum users for a hard fork, then it can happen.

Re: 153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack

#157

Post by codewiz »

swsieber wrote: post #126
codewiz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is rolling back transactions that are clearly part of a robbery a bad thing?

Because it's rolling back transactions that were done under "the law" (e.g. the ether contract stuff) by human intervention when the entire draw of the ether contract stuff was the promise of no human intervention

I don't think anyone could honestly promise that.

The law is written in code, and clearly code can be changed by human intervention. It's even open source, so technically anyone can change the Ethereum protocol, at any time.

Of course, changes to the law are effective only when there is overwhelming consensus, otherwise they're called minority forks.

Re: 153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack

#158

Post by Jtsummers »

codewiz wrote: post #106
matt_wulfeck wrote: post #100

I'm sure they'll just hard fork again. And nobody cares because ethereum isn't actually being used for anything real, just a bunch of enthusiasts trying to get rich.

How is rolling back transactions that are clearly part of a robbery a bad thing?

It demonstrates that Ethereum isn't what it claimed to be. ETH was supposed to be smart contracts where the "code is the law". Clearly, after the DAO debacle, that's not the case.

This means that ETH has no actual value. It adds nothing to the legal or economic landscape because it does nothing new (if we repeatedly rollback and hard fork because of "hacks" like this). This isn't a hack. This isn't theft. This is morons who don't know how to code coding in a crappy language meant to run on an even crappier VM. The only victims here are the people who were duped into investing in ETH in the first place. Poor saps.

Re: 153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack

#159

Post by dsfyu404ed »

cookiecaper wrote: post #125
dna_polymerase wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can literally feel how Ethereum changes the law. I mean, seriously, no need for lawyers anymore. On ethereum it's is simple: You got fucked, live with it. "Bad faith? It's the code, didn't you read it?"

Won't happen. People need to believe that the justice system will hear their pleas and consider factors on-balance, and then proceed in fairness. In real law, there are several potential overrides available to stop egregiously unfair outcomes that would otherwise be legally valid (estoppel, unconscionability, etc.). People will not accept a system that does not have the appearance of fairness (regardless of its actua…

And the inverse also applies. People (groups and individuals) want to be able to throw their power around and leave people they don't like at "sucks to be you". This behavior has been the status quo for millennia.

Re: 153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack

#160

Post by zanny »

codewiz wrote: post #106
matt_wulfeck wrote: post #100

I'm sure they'll just hard fork again. And nobody cares because ethereum isn't actually being used for anything real, just a bunch of enthusiasts trying to get rich.

How is rolling back transactions that are clearly part of a robbery a bad thing?

Because people want to dream this is some anarchist system where nobody controls etherium the same way everyone thinks bitcoin-core isn't a centralized authority on the protocol.

To dispute that de-facto centralization requires miners to collectively decide to abstain from updates to these primary clients en masse. That just won't happen, people don't organize or coordinate like that. The status quo has tremendous inertia beyond what can be reasonably expected of independent actors trying to act in their own self interest.

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