The Ethereum Core Developers and the Ethereum Security Community were made aware of the potential Constantinople-related issues identified by ChainSecurity on January 15, 2019. We are investigating any potential vulnerabilities and will follow with updates in this blog post and across social media channels.
Out of an abundance of caution, key stakeholders around the Ethereum community have determined that the best course of action will be to delay the planned Constantinople fork that would have occurred at block 7,080,000 on January 16, 2019.
This will require anyone running a node (node operators, exchanges, miners, wallet services, etc…) to update to a new version of Geth or Parity before block 7,080,000. Block 7,080,000 will occur in approximately 32 hours from the time of this publishing or at approximately January 16, 8:00pm PT / January 16, 11:00pm ET / January 17, 4:00am GMT.
If you are a person who simply interacts with Ethereum (you do not run a node), you do not need to do anything.
The article by ChainSecurity dives deep into the potential vulnerability and how smart contracts can be checked for the vulnerability. Very briefly:
Contracts that increase their probability to being vulnerable are contracts that utilize a transfer() or send() function followed by a state-changing operation. An example of such a contract would be one where two parties jointly receive funds, decide on how to split said funds, and initiate a payout of those funds.
Security researchers like ChainSecurity and TrailOfBits ran (and are still running) analysis across the entire blockchain. They did not find any cases of this vulnerability in the wild. However, there is still a non-zero risk that some contracts could be affected.
Because the risk is non-zero and the amount of time required to determine the risk with confidence is longer the amount of time available before the planned Constantinople upgrade, a decision was reached to postpone the fork out of an abundance of caution.
Parties involved in the discussions included, but were not limited to:
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This article was put together in a collaborative effort by EvanVanNess, Infura, MyCrypto, Parity, Status, The Ethereum Foundation, and the Ethereum Cat Herders.
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