Bitcoin developers released a new version of Bitcoin Core Client on September 18 after fixing a “very frightening” bug that could have caused a malicious party to take many nodes offline.
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In the release notes for Bitcoin Core version 0.16.3, Vladimir van der Laan confirmed that the vulnerability, known as CVE-2018-17144, had received an effective patch. The Bitcoin Core Client continues to be the most popular client, today comprising over 94 percent of all Bitcoin software implementations on Nodes.

The denial of service vulnerability …. which can be exploited by miners, was discovered in Bitcoin Core versions 0.14.0 to 0.16.2, summarized van der Laan. It is recommended that you update one of the older versions to 0.16.3 as soon as possible.

CVE-2018-17144 could technically have allowed a malicious miner or group of miners to perform duplicate transactions and burn block rewards to force nodes out of the network. Cobra, the creator of Bitcoin.org, said the bug even has the potential to create chaos in a “giant piece” of the ecosystem.

A very scary bug in Bitcoin Core has just been fixed which could have crashed a huge chunk of the Bitcoin network if exploited by any rogue miners.

Bitcoin deposits are still safe

Apart from the official release note, the developers did not yet explain the origin and circumstances of the code in question. On co-developer Andrew Chow pointed out on Github that a “third party” reported the error.

The mistake was also passed on to other projects and communicated to us, Matt Corallo added.

Bitcoin core bugs are more of a rarity, making the discovery of CVE-2018-17144 an unusual exception. The bug would have resulted in Nodes being paralyzed, but the users’ deposits were safe at all times.

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