New vulnerabilities discovered in PoS-based cryptocurrencies (Fake Stake attacks)
By Rafał - 2019-01-25


CryptoBridge reacts
On 24th January one of the major cryptocurrency exchange ‘CryptoBridge’ temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals for several PoS-based crypto assets as a precautionary step to the ‘Fake Stake’ attacks which are believed to be potentially affecting those cryptocurrencies. All these assets will remain disabled until its team ensures that the necessary changes to the code have been made and the risk is eliminated.A disclosure about these vulnerabilities was done to the development teams of affected cryptocurrencies back in October 2018 before this current public disclosure. Accordingly, the development teams of most of the cryptocurrencies have already taken some necessary measures such as ad-hoc defences and deployed mitigations. Although, an efficient way to deal with ‘fake stake’ attack is yet to be discovered which will reject the invalid blocks instantly and avoid getting stuck on a chain split risk.For detailed information on these vulnerabilities and ‘Fake Stake’ attack, visithttps://medium.com/@dsl_uiuc/fake-stake-attacks-on-chain-based-proof-of-stake-cryptocurrencies-b8b05723f806CryptoBridge announcement can be found here https://crypto-bridge.org/2019/01/24/deposit-and-withdrawal-precautions-fake-stake-vulnerability/Great work by Decentralized Systems Lab. Be aware and share.https://t.co/RTAR0VT0Rz
— CryptoBridge (@CryptoBridge) January 24, 2019