Essential upgrades for Ethereum 2.0 have been slow but steady. As technical issues continue to disrupt the network, which has dragged on for more than two years, researchers have now detailed three scenarios of how Ethereum 2.0’s proof-of-stake (PoS) design could still be under attack. Do not worry; they can also be corrected.
Serious Attacks on Ethereum’s PoS design
The world’s second most valuable cryptocurrency, Ethereum (ETH), has managed to notch another ATH in the early hours of Wednesday after last week’s successful completion of the 2.0 Altair Beacon Chain update.
A group of researchers had previously identified three potential scenarios for compromising the design of the new consensus mechanism. Despite this, Ethereum Foundation’s Danny Ryan is confident that “The Merge” will not be delayed, and the fix will be rolled out before Ethereum’s upcoming upgrade.
According to Ryan, there are two simple fixes that have been proposed for the choice of fork – “offer boosting” and “offer view synchronization”.
Formally analyzed by the researchers at Stanford, the first solution – proposer boosting has been “spec’d” since April this year. In addition, the fix has also been implemented in at least one client.
In contrast, the second solution – the synchronization of the proposer’s view – is in its first phase of formal analysis, but researchers are quite optimistic about it. Due to the reasons associated with simplicity and maturity in analysis, the researchers are now working with this method to fix all three attacks. As such, the developers at the Ethereum Foundation will implement this fix before the decisive phase of the transition begins.
No Hard Fork Required
In the latest blog post, Ryan also assured the community that the deployment of the Merge upgrade will not be delayed in any way. Also, applying the patch does not introduce breaking changes and does not need any kind of “hard fork”. Detailing the same, he said,
“This fix targets only the fork choice and is therefore congruous with the Merge specs as written today. Under normal conditions the fork choice is exactly the same as it is today, but in the event of attack scenarios, the fixed version contributes to ensuring the stability of the chain.
As a matter of fact, ETH researchers and developers believe that the first proposed fix – proposer boosting – will be integrated formally into the consensus specs by the end of November this year. That way, it will be live on Merge test networks by mid-January 2022.
