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#General #Development #Mobile Development #Cloud & DevOps #Cybersecurity & Privacy #AI & Data Science #Hardware & Gadgets #Design & UXEthereum Dev Roundup: Q1
The last one and a half months have seen great progress for Ethereum research, and we are excited that the protocol is moving closer and closer to the point where it is ready for mainstream adoption. Progress on consensus algorithms, privacy, zero knowledge proofs and formal verification is happening at...
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Ethereum JS Ecosystem Updates
It's been a fairly busy for the last couple of months for the Ethereum javascripters. To start with, there was a really great hackathon with IPFS.You can read Dan Finlay'sexcellent write up here. Also, during this time Aaron Davis (Kumavis) made s...
Ethereum R&D Roundup: Valentineβs Day Edition
During the last month and a half, the Ethereum core development and research teams have been building upon the progress made in the last year, and with the specter of last year's security issues now well behind us, work has begun in full force on implementing the Metropolis hard fork....
An Update on Integrating Zcash on Ethereum (ZoE)
Members of the Ethereum R&D team and the Zcash Company are collaborating on a research project addressing the combination of programmability and privacy in blockchains. This joint post is being concurrently posted on the Zcash blog,and is coauthored by Ariel Gabizon (Zcash) and Christian Reitwiessner (Ethereum). Ethereumβs flexible smart...
Introduction of the Light Client for DApp developers
The first version of the Light Ethereum Subprotocol (LES/1) and its implementation in Geth are still in an experimental stage, but they are expected to reach a more mature state in a few months where the basic functions will perform reliably.The light client has been designed to function more or...
December Roundup
December marks a month of continued progressin the Ethereum ecosystem. Research on proof of stake and sharding continues after the research team's workshop in Singapore in November, the light client slowly keeps getting better, Whisper and Swarm keep moving forward, and discussions on protocol economics and community governance co...
Security alert [12/19/2016]: Ethereum.org Forums Database Compromised
On December 16, we were made aware that someone had recently gained unauthorized access to a database from forum.ethereum.org. We immediately launched a thorough investigation to determine the origin, nature, and scope of this incident. Here is what we know: The information that was recently accessed is...
Swarm alpha public pilot and the basics of Swarm
With the long awaited geth 1.5 ("let there bee light") release, Swarm made it into the official go-ethereum release as an experimental feature. The current version of the code is POC 0.2 RC5 -- "embrace your daemons" (roadmap), which is the refactored and cleaner version of the codebase that was...
The History of Casper - Chapter 2
This chapter describes the game theory and economic security modelling we were doing in the Fall of 2014. It recounts how the "bribing attacker model" led our research directly to a radical solution to the long range attack problem....
The History of Casper - Chapter 1
Vitalik suggested last week that I share my basic research and design philosophy in a blog post, I agreed but complained that it was still changing. My friend Jon West told me that everyone would really appreciate it if I told everyone about my Casper research, I mostly agreed. Then...
zkSNARKs in a nutshell
The possibilities of zkSNARKs are impressive, you can verify the correctness of computations without having to execute them and you will not even learn what was executed - just that it was done correctly. Unfortunately, most explanations of zkSNARKs resort to hand-waving at some point and thus they remain something...
Ethereum Research Update
This week marks the completionof our fourth hard fork, Spurious Dragon,and the subsequent state clearing process, the final steps in the two-hard-fork solution to the recent Ethereum denial of service attacks that slowed down the network in September and October. Gas limits are in the proce...
Security alert [11/24/2016]: Consensus bug in geth v1.4.19 and v1.5.2
Security Alert Affected configurations: Geth Severity: High Summary: An issue has been identified with Geth's journaling mechanism. This caused a network fork at block #2686351 (Nov-24-2016 14:12:07 UTC). The...
Hard Fork No. 4: Spurious Dragon
The Ethereum network will be undergoing a hard fork at block number 2,675,000, which will likely occur between 15:00 and 16:00 UTC on Tuesday, November 22, 2016. A countdown timer can be seen at https://fork.codetract.io/. The Morden test network will be undergoing a hard fork at block number 1,885,000....
Whoa⦠Geth 1.5
The Go Ethereum team isvery proud to finally release Geth 1.5, which can almost be called a complete internal rewrite of the Go Ethereum (go-ethereum) codebase. We've packed a huge number of changes into this release, and simply listingthem wouldn't do them justice. Instead, we've decided to write them...
Analysis of Storage Corruption Bug
This blog post providesan update onour findings following the discovery of the storage corruption bug last week. Insummary, the bugwasmuch less severe than we initially thought. The small number of affected contracts we found is either only exploitable by the owner, or the exploit can only cause a disruption in...
Security Alert - Solidity - Variables can be overwritten in storage
Summary: In some situations, variables can overwrite other variables in storage. Affected Solidity compiler versions: 0.1.6 to 0.4.3 (including 0.4.4 pre-release versions) Detailed description: Storage variables that are smaller than 256 bits are packed together into the same 256 bit slot if they can fit. If a...
Uncle Rate and Transaction Fee Analysis
One of the important indicators of how much load the Ethereum blockchain can safely handle is how the uncle rate responds to the gas usage of a transaction. In all blockchains of the Satoshian proof-of-work variety, any block that is published has the risk of howbecoming a "stale", ie. not...
Security Alert - Mist can be vulnerable when navigating to malicious DApps
Mist leaks some low level APIs, which Dapps could use to gain access to the computer's file system and read/delete files. This would only affect you if you navigate to an untrusted Dappthatknows about these vulnerabilities and specifically tries to attack users. Upgrading Mist is highly recommended to prevent exposure...
FAQ: Upcoming Ethereum Hard Fork
The Ethereum network will be undergoing a hard fork at block number 2463000, which will likely occur between 12:00 and 13:00 UTC on Tuesday, October 18, 2016. A countdown timer can be seen at https://fork.codetract.io/....
Announcement of imminent hard fork for EIP150 gas cost changes
During the last couple of weeks, the Ethereum network has been the target of a sustained attack. The attacker(s) have been very crafty in locating vulnerabilities in the client implementations as well as the protocol specification. While the recent patches have led to an overall increased resiliency in the...
Transaction spam attack: Next Steps
Today the network was attacked by a transaction spam attack that repeatedly called the EXTCODESIZE opcode (see trace sample here), thereby creating blocks that take up to 20-60 seconds to validate due to the 50,000 disk fetches needed to process the transaction. The result of this was a ~2-3x reduction...
The Ethereum network is currently undergoing a DoS attack
URGENT ALL MINERS: The network is under attack. The attack is a computational DDoS, ie. miners and nodes need to spend a very long time processing some blocks. This is due to the EXTCODESIZE opcode, which has a fairly low gasprice but which requires nodes to read state information from...
Security alert - All geth nodes crash due to an out of memory bug
Security Alert Affected configurations: Geth Likelihood: High Severity: High Summary: geth nodes running out of memory and crashing on block https://etherchain.org/block/2283416 Details: TBD Solution: [Geth 1.4.12](http...
Dev Update: Formal Methods
Today, I am delighted to announce that Yoichi Hirai (pirapira on github) is joining the Ethereum project as a formal verification engineer. He holds a PhD from the University of Tokyo on the topic of formalizing communicating parallel processes and created formal verification tools for Ethereum in his spare time....
On Inflation, Transaction Fees and Cryptocurrency Monetary Policy
The primary expense that must be paid by a blockchain is that of security. The blockchain must pay miners or validators to economically participate in its consensus protocol, whether proof of work or proof of stake, and this inevitably incurs some cost. There are two ways to pay for this...
Onward from the Hard Fork
The foundation has committed to support the community consensus on the admittedly difficult hard fork decision. Seeing the results of various metrics, including carbonvote, dapp and ecosystem infrastructure adoption, this means that we will focus our resources and attention on the chain which is now called ETH (ie. the fork...
Hive: How we strived for a clean fork
The DAO soft-fork attempt was difficult. Not only did it turn out that we underestimated the side effects on the consensus protocol (i.e. DoS vulnerability), but we also managed to introduce a data race into the rushed implementation that was a ticking time bomb. It was not ideal, and even...
Hard Fork Completed
We would like to congratulate the Ethereum community on a successfully completed hard fork. Block 1920000 contained the execution of an irregular state change which transferred ~12 million ETH from the "Dark DAO" and "Whitehat DAO" contracts into the WithdrawDAO recovery contract. The fork itself took place smoothly, with roughly...
To fork or not to fork
The DAO, though not a product developed by the Ethereum Foundation, has been a hot topic as of late, both internally in the organisation as well as within our community.The Hard Fork is a delicate topic and the way we see it, no decision is the right one. As this...
How to build server less applications for Mist
Ethereum is not meant to be a platform to build esoteric smart contract applications that require a STEM degree to understand, but it aims to be one pillar of a different architecture for applications on the world wide web. With this post we will try to elucidate how this can...
Taylorβs Summer Update
Hey everyone, I spent some time with our Canadian friends in Toronto after presenting "Ethereum: The World Computer" at Blockchain Training Conference last month and I wanted to provide a quick update on some of the exciting happenings in the Ethereum dev ecosystem. Lots of things are brewing behinds the...
C++ DEV Update - July edition
Since the last C++ DEV Update, a lot of things happened in the engine room which were not really visible to the outside. This post wants to give an overview about what we are currently working on. Apart from the features side, Bob has been working on a proposed...
The Devcon2 site is now live!
The Devcon2 web site is officially live now! You can find it athttps://ethereumfoundation.org/devcon/ Thanks foreveryone's interest, proposals, support and enthusiasm. We have an amazing community and areexcited to present the first Ethereum Foundation event in Asia. This year, Devcon2 (September 19, 20, 21) will be a featured conference...