It has come to limelight that the ‘unidentified person’ who informed Bitcoin ABC developers of a potential exploit in Bitcoin Cash is surprisingly a Bitcoin Core (Bitcoin’s underlying software) developer.
If the vulnerability had not been notified on time, it could have caused an unintentional split of Bitcoin Cash’s network.
Through a Medium blog post, Cory Fields, one of the Bitcoin Core developers, revealed that he was the smart mind which privately and anonymously cautioned Bitcoin ABC of the SIGHASH_BUG in the altcoin on April 25, 2018.
Fields, who is involved in Digital Currency Initiative of MIT Media’s Lab, stated that an exploit of the vulnerability would have made the transactions unsafe on the Bitcoin cash network. The flaw was quickly fixed within a month after it was brought to notice by Fields.
Fields has also underlined that the greatest threat faced by Bitcoin is avoiding bugs that may turn out to be disastrous to the network.
Fields says
“I’m often asked at conferences and workshops what I consider to be Bitcoin’s greatest challenge in the future. My answer is always the same: avoiding catastrophic software bugs.”
Fields believes that the risk posed by software bugs to cryptocurrencies is still largely underestimated and the firms in the crypto sector must take adequate measures to face such threats. Fields pointed out the vulnerability that existed in Bitcoin Cash as an example.
One of the main reasons for Bitcoin ABC to face such an issue is that it did not have a proper disclosure policy. Furthermore, Fields was unable to find public encryption keys for Bitcoin ABC’s lead developers to send encrypted messages and avoid the risk of being viewed by hackers.
