Experts from University College London studied smart contracts in the Ethereum network and discovered more than 34 thousand vulnerabilities that provide hackers with the ability to easily hack programs and connect to their control. However, the researchers noted that they are not sure that they have discovered all possible vulnerabilities.
To conduct the research, the experts created their own fork of the network, after which the team ran scenarios and scripts that monitored the behavior of smart contracts under certain conditions.
As a result, the experts were able to test more than a million smart contracts. After discovering a large number of vulnerabilities, separate testing was carried out for three thousand of them. All initial doubts were confirmed with almost 100% accuracy.
The researchers noted that if they wanted to steal funds, they could withdraw at least $6 million from Ethereum.
As for the release that was published after testing, it states that:
• There is a high need for early detection of smart contract vulnerabilities in order to properly secure everything crypto community;
• The main purpose of all the studied applications is to manage the financial capital of users; they cannot be changed;
• The research team could not find the creators of the smart contracts in which vulnerabilities were discovered;
• In general, the segment can be considered as conditionally safe; those who want to independently check it for vulnerabilities need to do serious work at the level of technical expertise;
Vulnerabilities are a serious problem that needs to be dealt with at an early stage. After all, in the future this could lead to serious hacker attacks and irreversible consequences. So, due to a problem with the vulnerability of one of the smart contracts, the Japanese exchange Coincheck was hacked in January.
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