EOS Weakness Will Result in ‘Massive Exchange Hack’
The EOS network is yet to finalize its first blocks and one blockchain researcher is already speculating that an as-yet-undiscovered weakness in the promising cryptocurrency’s codebase will result in a “massive exchange hack” soon.
Cornell professor Emin Gün Sirer writing on Twitter predicted his belief that EOS, which was released last week after a yearlong crowdsale that gathered over $4 billion, will be the sole cause of a massive cryptocurrency exchange hack within the near future.
“I’m calling it: there will be a massive exchange hack within the next year, taking advantage of an EOS vulnerability. That exchange will lose its hot wallet.”
“If EOS uses its arbitrators to reverse the hack, the contagion will spread downstream,” he added. There will be threats of lawsuits involving the devs and the [block producers].”
Even though he gave an explanation that this prediction is not driven by any specific weakness he has discovered or believes lies hidden within the EOS source code, he claimed that such a deed can possibly not be avoided because of the way developers “handle safety critical bugs.”
As reported earlier, a bug in the EOS network resulted in the blockchain to come to a stoop for few hours on Saturday as developers rushed to launch a patch. This code error happened less than 48 hours following the EOS blockchain activation. The bug rapidly patched, yet Sirer condemned developers for rushing it without enough analysis.
“You can’t incrementally patch your way to correctness,” he said. “In the same vein, you can’t start out with some bricks, beams, and cables over a body of water, patch the holes where cars fall into the ocean, and end up with a load-bearing bridge.”
In a final note, Sirer reminded users not to store coins on cryptocurrency exchanges, as if his prediction occurs, it could have significant implications for all traders. He also advises users to demand more transparency from developers when launching postmortems after patching bugs.
“Ask that development teams provide careful postmortems after bugs, describing not only the patch to fix them, but the changes made to address whatever gave rise to the bug in the first place,” he said.
