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I started archiving the slock.it #general slack channel when this attack began. This is where most of the discussion has been taking place. Here's up until a few minutes ago: http://pastebin.com/DykumjLs
@channel EMERGENCY ALERT! IF YOU HAVE A SPLIT OPEN PLEASE DM @griff ASAP!!! azzo [2:22 PM] what's DM
The 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…
It doesn't "go missing", presumably the hacker will drain it into Bitcoin via any anonymous exchange accounts they have. Everyone loses big time (except the attacker if they manage to launder some of the coins). Watch for a wave of rebranding.
> How severe could this attack be - does it pose an existential threat to The DAO (or Ethereum, more broadly)?
We will see. The group behind TheDAO has a lot of pull - if Ethereum successfully rejects calls for a hard fork that will damage it severely in the public's eye, but will be the ultimate proof of concept.
> How is this attack being perpetrated? Has the attack vector been previously anticipated? Why is this unexpected?
Why, take a look: https://blog.slock.it/no-dao-funds-at-risk-following-the-eth...
Copied:
""" No DAO funds at risk following the Ethereum smart contract ‘recursive call’ bug discovery Our team is blessed to have Dr. Christian Reitwießner, Father of Solidity, as its Advisor. During the early development of the DAO Framework 1.1 and thanks to his guidance we were made aware of a generic vulnerability common to all Ethereum smart contracts. We promptly circumvented this so-called “recursive call vulnerability” or “race to empty” from the DAO Framework 1.1 as can be seen on line 580: // we are setting this here before the CALL() value transfer to // assure that in the case of a malicious recipient contract trying // to call executeProposal() recursively money can’t be transferred // multiple times out of the DAO p.proposalPassed = true; Three days ago this design vulnerability potential was raised in a blog post which subsequently led to the discovery of such an issue in an unrelated project, MakerDAO. This was highlighted in a reddit post, with MakerDAO being able to drain their own funds safely before the vulnerability could be exploited. Around 12 hours ago user Eththrowa on the DAOHub Forum spotted that while we had identified the vulnerability in one aspect of the DAO Framework, the existing (and deployed) DAO reward account mechanism was affected. His message and our prompt confirmation can be found here. We issued a fix immediately as part of the DAO Framework 1.1 milestone. The important takeaway from this is: as there is no ether whatsoever in the DAO’s rewards account — this is NOT an issue that is putting any DAO funds at risk today. """
It's almost as if a cryptocurrency system used by the grey market and black market sections of the internet contained actual blackhats. What a surprise. Much as I hate to link to reddit, for effective and biting criticism of cryptocurrencies: http://reddit.com/r/buttcoin
The 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…
Real time chart for DAO/BTC (Down 41% currently): https://poloniex.com/exchange#btc_dao
It's almost as if a cryptocurrency system used by the grey market and black market sections of the internet contained actual blackhats. What a surprise. Much as I hate to link to reddit, for effective and biting criticism of cryptocurrencies: http://reddit.com/r/buttcoin
What grey/black market sites accept eth. Pretty sure most of them historically have been Bitcoin based.
This pretty directly contradicts a lot of the hype around Ethereum. Yes, bad contract code is bad, but a lot of money is about to evaporate. If it isn't easy to write secure contracts then there is a serious deployment problem.
No money is going to evaporate. First of all, the value just changes hands and second of all, there is no money involved, just toy bits.
The 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…
It's a reentry bug - native ETH always calls the recipient contract's code on transfer, which can call back into the current function. If you manage native ETH do accounting in the wrong order, you can "withdraw" multiple times. It doesn't "go missing", presumably the hacker will drain it into Bitcoin via any anonymous exchange accounts they have. Everyone loses big time (except the attacker if they manage to launder…
The 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…
The code behind the DAO is available here [2].
Apparently [3], there's a bug where one can recursively call `splitDAO` multiple times to extract ether from the contract if one has a split open.
- Ether can go missing when it is sent to a public address which has no known corresponding private key. It's a "we can't inverse a hash" type of problem.
- People lose if they're holding a long position on ETH, or have DAO which they can now no longer recoup to ETH. People gain if they're shorting ETH, or are the attacker themselves (it looks like the ETH from the dao is going to this address [4])
- Looks to be an existential threat to the DAO from where we're standing right now. I can't see any mitigations but an entire Ethereum blockchain split.
[1] https://blog.slock.it/no-dao-funds-at-risk-following-the-eth...
[2] https://github.com/slockit/DAO/blob/develop/DAO.sol
[3] http://pastebin.com/DykumjLs
[4] http://etherscan.io/address/0x304a554a310c7e546dfe434669c628...