AI agents message board set up to rescue Glamsterdam fork
The second and final testnet for Ethereum’s Glamsterdam hard fork was cancelled this week, after ChainSecurity found vulnerabilities in the gas scaling Ethereum Improvement Proposals that could have spelled big trouble for at least 13 DeFi contracts.
The bugs were connected to EIP-8037/8038 and would result in contracts breaking that rely on the way gas currently behaves when a call runs out of gas. It’s complicated, but an attacker may have been able to exploit the resulting vulnerabilities created.
The hard fork testnet dress rehearsal on Hoodi will not be rescheduled until all the second order effects of the fork are gamed out. In an article on X today, Derek Chiang from Eth Labs noted the vulnerability was found out at a few minutes to midnight, which is less than ideal, “causing everyone to scramble to deal with the fallout.”
“In the future, protocol designers would do well to conduct much more thorough analysis of potential breakages that their update might introduce, and to do so much earlier in the process.”
Hard to see why they didn’t think of that in the first place for a blockchain settling $19 trillion of stablecoin volume each year — but better late than never. Chiang says researchers from Eth Labs and the Ethereum Foundation had been independently using AI Agents to scan contracts for vulnerabilities, and when they realized they were both employing the same strategy they “set up a message board for their agents in the form of a github repo” to coordinate the work.
He noted the similarities to the OpenAI <> Hugging Face hack where rogue agents set up a board to coordinate the attacks. “Well, turns out the same pattern is useful for the good agents too,” he said. The exercise has been so successful that a second AI Agent message board has been set up to examine the effects of EIP-8198, aka “Quick Slots” which has been proposed for the subsequent Hegota hard fork.
Steal My Bitcoin site aims to prove Bitcoin isn’t vulnerable to PHP2Shell scare
A new website that hasn’t been patched for the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities hopes to prove that a Bitcoin wallet isn’t vulnerable to the biggest cybersecurity scare of the year. The Steal My Bitcoin site has hidden the key to a Bitcoin wallet worth around $2000 which is accessible to the PHP user account through a binary called print-flag.
Source: StealMyBitcoin
At the time of writing the site has been up for 25 hours without a successful hack, although it has periodically been offline due to heavy traffic and probing attempts.
PHP is a programming language widely used to power websites and web applications, including content management systems. Government agencies and other organizations in the Netherlands, Australia, Japan, Finland and elsewhere took websites offline Wednesday as a precaution while PHP released emergency patches for two related critical vulnerabilities. The flaws could allow unauthenticated attackers to execute code on affected servers without logging in
Solana’s Alpenglow launches on mainnet
Solana’s first major consensus upgrade, Alpenglow, went live on mainnet around 1:54 pm UTC on Wednesday, according to the Solana Foundation’s Alpenglow dashboard.
Agave developer Anza says the time it takes a transaction to become final has fallen from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds, which is a 99% cut. To date DeFi activity has been flat or fallen slightly, but it’s early days yet.
The upgrade’s first phase, Votor, replaces the existing voting and finalization mechanism with direct validator voting and a certificate-based system. The headline transaction count will fall by around 60% as a result of the changes. A later phase will introduce Rotor, a new block data-distribution protocol intended to replace Turbine.
StarkNet votes to start work on becoming a post-quantum L1
Starknet’s community has voted to support research into becoming an independent, post-quantum layer-1 blockchain.
The network’s potential departure from Ethereum gained overwhelming support. The governance vote that ran for seven days closed on Thursday. The poll drew about 3,200 votes, with 93.52% of voting power in favor of the transition.
The actual shift itself would require a separate, binding governance vote. For now, Starknet will continue operating as an Ethereum layer-2 network.
“We’re beginning work on a whitepaper even before we start the weekend, and hope to release a draft for public scrutiny in November,” StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson told Cointelegraph. StarkNet saw the biggest fall of the top 100 coins this week, erasing one quarter of its value.
Source: Made with Google AI
US senator probes Tether after reported deal with ex-Trump crypto adviser
Senator Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate’s investigations subcommittee, has requested information from Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino after the Wall Street Journal reported it had inked a $6.3…
cointelegraph.com