The Pentagon, through a special unit, released a study that contains several Bitcoin vulnerabilitiesas well as from the ethereum network. The material was produced by the company Trail of Bits, founded in 2012 to seek to help famous companies solve cybersecurity problems. The special unit in question is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), responsible for conducting advanced military defense research in the United States. It is worth remembering that Bitcoin it is a new digital currency technology that has no ties to governments or companies. And it is precisely this libertarian rationale that strikes fear into regulators, who cannot control the technology.
The Pentagon publishes a study with alleged vulnerabilities in Bitcoin and Ethereum
DARPA commissioned a study to understand to what extent public blockchains are truly decentralized and secure, these being its fundamental points. The company that conducted the survey was Trail of Bits, focusing its study on bitcoin and ethereum. According to the security firm, one of the challenges of blockchains is trust in programmers, who can induce bugs in code and smart contracts. Also, people should trust that blockchains are truly immutable. Trail also stated that the number of entities that can cause problems in the network Bitcoin they are few, that is to say, this network is in great danger. In the case of ethereumthe risk is even higher, just like networks that use PoS mining.
“The number of entities sufficient to disrupt a blockchain is relatively low: four for Bitcoin, two for Ethereum, and less than a dozen for most PoS networks. The vast majority of Bitcoin nodes do not appear to engage in mining and node operators do not face an explicit penalty for dishonesty.”
The study also reveals that currently the nodes are not good and no penalties are seen for their dishonesty in the network. So their function is low for the network to be healthy in the current scenario, with 21% of these servers still running old versions of BitcoinCore. In the case of ethereumthe study released by the Pentagon stated that contracts are highly reused, with 90% of smart contracts related to others previously created, which could represent a high probability of problems and errors.
Network immutability can be broken, but not by encryption
The study commissioned by the Pentagon also shows that Bitcoin may have vulnerabilities in the immutability of its network, not because of its encryption, which was considered secure, but because of the implementations, networks and protocols that surround it. On Twitter, DARPA published the study stating that the vulnerabilities found can cause significant impacts in this sector, although this information is the responsibility of the authors of the study. With decades of technology experience, DARPA is recognized as the “brain of the Pentagon” whose mission is to protect US interests in the military sector.
