Vulnerability Found in Babylon Staking Code Could Slow Block Generation Speed

According to a report by Cointelegraph, developers revealed a software vulnerability in the Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon on Thursday, which could potentially allow malicious validators to disrupt part of the network's consensus process and slow down block generation speed during critical times. The vulnerability affects Babylon's block signature scheme, known as the BLS Voting Extension scheme, used to prove that validators have reached consensus on a block. Malicious validators could intentionally omit the block hash field when sending voting extensions, potentially causing consensus issues among validators during network epoch boundaries. The block hash field informs validators which blocks they are actually voting to support during the consensus process, and this vulnerability allows for its omission. Theoretically, malicious validators could cause other validators to crash during critical consensus checks at phase boundaries, leading to a slowdown in block generation speed if multiple validators are affected. There have been no descriptions of active exploitation of this vulnerability yet, but developers warn that if left unresolved, it could be exploited.

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