"Put a fork in it"
Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability
461–470 of 629 posts
Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability
#462Many people here stating that its purpose is tainted if they can just undo what the attacker did. After all, why not just have a centralized authority after all? I haven't researched this deeply, admittedly, but I think the idea is that they're using consensus from the community in order to undo what the attacker did. In other words, if the community didn't support it, it wouldn't be possible to do at all. Contrast t…
This works for the obvious thefts and high profile contracts but what about smaller contracts and more gray areas? Will the miners know about or care enough to actually efficiently resolve disputes fairly? Will there be a fork for the person who lost 500$ because of a bug in his contract? I’m worried that miners policing everything won’t be sustainable and in the end code will be the final arbiter on Etherium and as we all know writing code without bugs is an unrealistic expectation to place on people.
Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always wondered why there was such a rush to launch the DAO. As opposed to what Ethereum itself did: develop a proof of concept for over a year, then release a beta version and provide bounties for security bugs, all the while collaborating with testers and security researchers to stress the software.
TheDAO effectively turned into a massive bug bounty, a pot up for grabs.
Indeed an important question that will be decided soon is whether the "hacker" will get to keep the reward pot, or whether the rules of the game will change to deny it.
Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability
#464Can someone eli5 what DAO and ethereum are?
The DAO is basically an investment fund, i.e. people pool money to invest in companies and get shares.
Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability
#465I don't really understand smart contracts yet, but wouldn't it have been possible to implement the DAO in a way such that forks/cancellations could be "voted" on by the network somehow, versus requiring whatever this is going to require? Code fork? It least the fork would have been "decentralized" then... this does not bode well at all.
Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability
#466There's a pretty significant lesson here, and it's not that the DAO authors were careless. They were, and so were all of the investors, but the core problem is not the DAO.
It's Solidity. It's the Ethereum virtual machine. Even today, security vulnerabilities are being found in code strategies that are generally considered 'best practice'.
Writing a safe smart contract on Ethereum is extremely difficult, and most people playing with Ethereum don't seem to realize this. There's a pretty well understood maxim, "don't roll your own crypto." Etherem's smart contracts ARE cryptography, and their safety depends on implementation details that are completely hid from users during tutorials, and that even the language designers are only still discovering.
This article does a good job of demonstrating that safety is really hard: https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/10/smart-contract-security...
And it's one of the major reasons that the Bitcoin devs have not been excited about Ethereum. It's a project whose ambitions have outpaced our ability to engineer safely.
One day we can have safe smart contracts. But the Ethereum of today is not well designed, and is not a good foundation for smart contracts. A simple hardfork to fix this DAO mess isn't going to be enough. The whole virtual machine needs to be redesigned.
And my money is quite seriously on Bitcoin figuring out the safe way to do smart contracts faster that anyone else. The vast majority of experienced experts in this space are still spending the majority of their time on Bitcoin. As popular as Ethereum has become, Bitcoin still owns the mindshare, and there are good reasons that Bitcoin has chosen not to pursue smart contracts at this time.
Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
How easy is to tell if you're getting tainted coins? Just the mention of this sort of hard fork means anyone who is exchanging coins for USD or BTC is at risk of being stuck with a hot potato, with impacts on convertibility and confidence in the whole system.
The stolen coins are unspendable for the time being due to the design of the contract.
because... ?
Sounds someone already got stuck with the hot potato. Was it definitely the hacker? if so, how did the contract's design make the coins unspendable? sounds like it would have been an odd contract to enter into.
Sounds like the powers that be have said, 'I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.' If you're going to do this sort of thing, you need a transparent policy describing the circumstances under which you're going to do that and who will make that decision.
It's almost as if complex contracts need to come under a system of laws and an adjudication process. Otherwise might is right (in this case might being all profit to the superior hackers, or to the people who can make the decision to repudiate the letter of the contract)
Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but they didn't halt trading until they were asked to, so clearly it wasn't totally in their interests? Not at all. This is a classic "coordination problem". It is advantageous for many participants in the overall system to take an action, but only if the other participants are ALSO taking the action. In such a case, a widely followed and popular leader is one possible coordinating mechanism. And it does not give t…
a widely followed and popular leader is one possible coordinating mechanism. That's the exact opposite of decentralized. Are we going to have to redefine the word?
I'm not sure whether we are redefining it... I suppose it depends on what definition you were starting with!
My idea of "decentralized" includes things like "continues to function perfectly well if any one person or small group is removed from the process" and "continues to function perfectly well if any one person or small group becomes malicious".
In this case, if Vitalik Buterin were not around to announce the problem, someone else could announce it and that would provide a coordinating signal for all of the independent players to act on. If Vitalik Buterin were malicious and decided to announce a rollback of a big spend he had done, then the independent miners and mining pool operators would (I hope) choose to ignore the announcement and refuse to participate.
I guess to me, having a centralized group or individual make decisions seems to violate "decentralized", but having one of several possible groups or individuals make announcements which signal the population to take action does not.
Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the project leadership will intervene The project leadership can only propose change. Change requires "ratification" by a majority of miners as well as the support of node operators and holders. > So what now are the benefits of Ethereum smart contracts over the traditional legal system? The contract can only be invalidated by a significant majority / supermajority of the community through the consensus process. Th…
Not a single TheDAO proposal has even been close to reaching a quorum [0] to pass a vote. How is this ratification supposed to happen? [0] https://dao.report/?sort=popular&keywords&status%5B0%5D=1&st...
So far there hasn't been a single serious proposal, so naturally nobody is voting.
Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability
#470The provided link is just a page showing a bunch of transactions. For someone like me, who is not so intimate with the Ethereum terminology in use (but who is still interested in the DAO, as an observer), could someone provide a layman's explanation of what's going on? Somewhat more specifically, I'm wondering the following: - At a high level, what does this attack actually consist of? - How does ethereum "go missing…
We merged the earlier thread which linked to the transaction list ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11921216 ) with this one, which has more context.
Here is a message from the attacker, I'm not sure if it was posted elsewhere http://blockchainforum.info/t/time-for-a-big-bank-roll-after...