After The Merge, the fork of ETHPoW on the Ethereum blockchain went live this week. However, not everything goes as planned and some difficulties are felt. While the merger went well and the blockchain announces future plans for scaling, BlockSec detects a replay exploit on ETHPoW tokens.
BlockSec Alerts Investors to Replay Exploit with ETHPoW Tokens
After much debate, the blockchain of Proof-of-Work (PoW) of Ethereum has some flaws. According to a cybersecurity firm, the blockchain suffered a replay exploit on Sunday. The attacker replayed a message from the chain of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) on ETHPoW, which allowed him to obtain an additional 200 ETHW tokens.
According to BlockSec’s statements on Twitter, the operator (0x82fae) previously transferred 200 ETHW through the Gnosis Chain omni bridge. Then he replayed the same message on the channel Proof-of-Work and got another 200 wrapped ETH (WETH). Hence, the attack occurred because the bridge failed to accomplish its mission.
This is because it did not correctly check the channel ID of the cross-channel message. Following this alert, the ETHPoW blockchain development team said that the attack does not exploit their blockchain vulnerability, but the contractual one. These latter have writing in an average article that ETHW itself applied EIP-155. Also, there is no replay attack of ETHPoS and ETHPoS, which ETHW Core security engineers have planned in advance.
A devastating effect on the price of tokens
Currently, the bear market continues and major cryptocurrencies are trading in the red. As bitcoin (BTC) shed its $20,000 support again, the second crypto by market capitalization fell to $1,310 according to data from Tradingview. After BlockSec announced the exploit on Sunday morning, the token is down over 35%.
The developer team said that since Saturday they have been trying to get in touch with Omni Bridge to let them know about the risks. However, the bridge did not respond to an immediate request for comment. According to them, they contacted him in every possible way given the importance of his task.
Indeed, the bridges are responsible for correctly checking the ChainID of inter-chain messages. Therefore, there was a high probability of avoiding this attack. Currently, the consequences of the replay exploit are impacting the price of the ETHW token which is negotiate currently at $6,633.
Ethereum’s transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) at Proof-of-Stake (PoS) marked investors. Although the fork ofETHPoW has gone live, the token is going through a dark period right now due to the replay exploit with ETHPoW tokens exposed by BlockSec. While the proof-of-stake blockchain is evolving quite well and planning for many projects, Ethereum proof-of-work should definitely revisit its security issues.
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