Last week, a hacker mined two million Binance Coin (BNB) by exploiting a security flaw in the bridge BSC Token Hub. It is a protocol that allows you to lock tokens on the BNB Beacon Chain (BEP2), and receive an equivalent amount of another asset on the BNB Chain (BEP20), and vice versa. Fortunately, the incident was quickly brought under control, thanks in particular to the help of the validators. But how did this feat materialize? Moreover, what does the hard fork who was deployed following this hack? And what impact does it have on the BNB community? Exclusively, we return to this historic event that could have caused the fall of the Binance token!
Binance and BNB Chain have adopted corrective measures, but not only!
Within hours of the hack, the BNB Chain development team shut down the network. Then, it released a patch to prevent the attacker from continuing to transfer the funds to other platforms. This allowed him to regain control over the majority of hacked BNB tokens.
Moreover, to prevent possible attacks, it considered a number of preventive measures. In this case, it plans to put in place a model of governance more focused on decentralization. The new system, which should be introduced very soon, will allow validators to take part in votes on different development proposals. Initially, it will be a question of reacting to urgent questions currently pending, in particular:
- Should pirated assets be frozen or not?
- Whether or not to use the BNB Auto-Burn feature to destroy the tokens remaining?
- Can we consider a compensation program to award a million dollars to anyone who identifies a major bug on the platform?
- Is it relevant to offer a bonus, corresponding to 10% of the funds recovered, for the capture of the person responsible for the attack?
In addition, following numerous criticisms, Binance intends to decentralize the BNB Chain as much as possible by increasing the number of network participants. As a reminder, at the time of the events, only 26 of the 44 blockchain validators were active.
The deployment of the Moran hard fork
Last Wednesday, BNB Chain successfully completed its last major update. baptized Moran, this hard fork aimed to strengthen the security of the network infrastructure between the Beacon Chain and the BNB Chain. Specifically, it was supposed to remove the flaws behind the aforementioned attack, including by:
- eliminating the breach present in the verification system of the hashes of the iavl. As a reminder, the attacker took advantage of this vulnerability to have proofs of incorrect cryptographic hashes validated. This allowed him to edit information stored in the Merkle tree of the BSC Token Hub bridge and, thus, to transfer the stolen tokens to each other.
- introducing block headers into the sequence validation process within the contract “CrossChain Contract”. The idea is to further strengthen the proof of data integrity.
- including a relay in the list of candidate validators. As a reminder, a relay is a smart contract installed on a given blockchain that allows verification of events that occur on another blockchain. In addition, the candidates are nodes whose performance is relatively average and whose chances of producing blocks are reduced. This measure aims at the robustness of the network and the optimization of the interoperability between the two blockchains.
Binance users impacted?
Although the launch of hard fork required a temporary halt to deposits and withdrawals, it didn’t really affect the user experience for BNB token holders. The attack focused on bridge and did not target the interface or user wallets.
The only real impact it had was on BNB Chain validators, as the changes made impacted the system their nodes operate on. However, to get the situation back to normal, all they had to do was update their software. by uploading patches to GitHub.
To conclude
In the cryptocurrency industry, cyberattacks are commonplace. However, when faced with this kind of situation, the most important thing is how the problem is handled. In this specific case, the network reacted promptly, which made it possible to limit the damage as much as possible. In addition, the Moran hard fork has revived the activities of the BSC Token Hub. Additionally, validators have played an important role in securing the BNB Chain infrastructure. That said, their powers should expand with the implementation of this new model of decentralized governance.
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