A whitehat hacker protects smartBCH by reporting a vulnerability

Recently, a whitehat hacker pwningpwnwpnw reported a vulnerability in smartbchd.

The vulnerability is located in MoeingEVM’s `host_bridge`. It is a bug in the C++ implementation of SEP206. The overflow condition of `amount+margin` was not checked.

This is a severe vulnerability which allows an attacker to mint infinite BCH on the side chain and drain all the tokens in Swap’s pairs. If that happend, the only thing we can do is to hardfork smartBCH, just like what Ethereum did after “the DAO hack”.

To patch this vulnerability, we did the following modification:

1. Add more checks to `host_bridge`
2. Add abort-on-overflow logic to `host_bridge`
3. Make abort-on-overflow logic to smartbch’s golang code
4. Invalidate all the transactions which finish with one or more accounts with more than 21,000,000 BCH.

The latest smartbchd 0.4.7 is the patched version. If you have not updated your node’s binary, please update it.

To show our appreciation to pwningpwnwpnw the whitehat and to thank him for protecting the smartBCH sidechain, we the dev team would like to reward him with 150 BCH. We only got 1000 BCH in our 2021 flipstarter, so this is the best we can do.

But these 150 BCH cannot match pwningpwnwpnw’s contribution. We hereby call on the BCH and smartBCH supporters to donate more BCH as pwningpwnwpnw’s reward. Your donations will show the community’s unity and strength. Please kindly send your donations to the whitehat’s addresses: 0x1Aa2FC6E54838C5b1a8d5bD052484De56D485822 bitcoincash:qretmzu6nrs2cc88kw053jw7lsru57qteue7a3s6my.

Some BCH enthusiasts are going to set up a foundation to raise funds to boost the smartBCH ecosystem. They have promised that if they succeed, some of the raised funds will also be rewarded to pwningpwnwpnw, and a bug bounty program will be set up.

Thanks again to all the supporters. We will continue to develop smartBCH to make it a more secure and powerful chain.