Ethereum’s Leading Scaling Solution Would Have Allowed Bad Actors to Create Infinite ETH
Ethereum’s most popular second-layer scalability solution Optimism was vulnerable to the “Unbridled Optimism” attack — so were its forks, Boba and Metis.
Infinite Ethers for potential optimism attackers
Veteran developer Jay Freeman, well known as co-founder of Orchid and lead developer of iOS Jailbreak and Cydia tools, has published a detailed blog post on how Go-Ethereum fork Optimism could have been hacked.
According to his detailed explanation, a malicious actor could “mint” an arbitrary number of ETH tokens on any blockchain that utilizes Optimism Virtual Machine (OVM).
This could have been achieved by repeatedly triggering the SELFDESRUCT op-code on a contract with the mainnet Ethers in balance. By doing so, attackers could increase their ETH holdings infinitely.
Also, Optimism forks Boba and Metis were prone to similar attacks design.
Bug fix, $2 million bounty goes to hacker
According to the statement from the Optimism team, their experts have confirmed that the bug has never been exploited by “real” hackers: thus, all user funds are safe.
An emergence patch was released to Optimism mainnet and Kovan testnet just hours after the bug was disclosed. All forks and bridge providers were alerted: they should update their software to L2Geth version v0.5.11 in order to keep their systems synchronized with Optimism.
The platform awarded the maximum bounty amount of $2,000,042 to Freeman through the bug bounty instrument Immunefi. The white hat hacker announced he would be covering the February 18 crash at the ETHDenver conference.
