A Ethereum Core Dev saved Avalanche from “instant death”

Péter Szilágyi, a core engineer for Ethereum, published a study titled “Avalanche Vulnerability” on Thursday. The research describes a significant flaw that he discovered in the code for the Avalanche network earlier this year. In the paper that was dated March 29, 2022, Szilágyi detailed how Avalanche was susceptible to attack through the dissemination of a tainted PeerList package to the network’s nodes and validators.

It’s possible that an adversary brought down the entire Avalanche network by launching a new validator node, broadcasting malicious data to all of the network’s other nodes and validators, and then crashing them all simultaneously. According to what Szilágyi wrote, “it’s pretty much an insta-death for the entire network” because all of the nodes in the network connect to all of the validators.

Although launching such an assault would have required 2,000 AVAX tokens in order to fund the new validator node, this expense seems rather insignificant in light of the potential havoc that may have been caused by such a maneuver. Szilágyi highlighted that a hostile actor might easily recuperate the cost by opening a short position against AVAX before to the attack. This would effectively allow the actor to bring down the network at no risk to themselves. Prior to the discovery of the vulnerability, 2,000 AVAX tokens could have been purchased on the open market for close to $179,000. During the same time period, the market capitalization of Avalanche was well over 24 billion dollars.

Crypto Briefing attempted to contact Szilágyi in order to inquire about the manner in which he discovered the vulnerability. “I was trying to wrap my brain around how the [Avalanche] networking works and found the packet handling to be a bit unusual for my taste,” he explained. “I found the packet handling to be a bit peculiar for my taste.” “Therefore, in an effort to suffocate it, I’ve written a fuzzer. After discovering the flaw, Szilágyi alerted Avalanche’s software team, who rapidly corrected it in the avalanchego v1.7.9 upgrade the following day. “It went boom quite quickly.”[rb_related title=”More Read” style=”light” total=”4″]

During the bull market of 2021, Avalanche was one of numerous Layer 1 networks that experienced a meteoric rise in popularity. Users have rushed to alternative smart contract-enabled networks in order to participate in DeFi and mint NFTs at prices that are a fraction of what it costs on Ethereum mainnet as a direct response to the growing fees on Ethereum mainnet. After starting the year trading for roughly $3.21, the native AVAX token of the network reached an all-time high of $144.96 on November 21, 2021. This is a significant increase from its starting price of around $3.21. As a result of the Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates and the deteriorating state of the macroeconomy in 2022, the price of it has fallen along with the price of the rest of the cryptocurrencies on the market. AVAX is now trading at a price of about $18.81.