Denial-of-service vulnerability announcement

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Gavin Andresen 2012-05-14 14:07:04 -04:00
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<h1>CVE-2012-2459: Critical Vulnerability (denial-of-service)</h1>
<p>
A denial-of-service vulnerability that affects all versions of
bitcoind and Bitcoin-Qt has been reported and fixed. An attacker
could isolate a victim's node and cause the creation of blockchain
forks.
</p>
<p>
Because this bug could be exploited to severely disrupt the Bitcoin
network we consider this a critical vulnerability, and encourage
everybody to upgrade to the latest version: 0.6.2.
</p>
<p>
Backports for older releases (0.5.5 and 0.4.6) are also available if
you cannot upgrade to version 0.6.2.
</p>
<p>
Full technical details are being withheld to give people the
opportunity to upgrade.
</p>
<p>
Thanks to Forrest Voight for discovering and reporting the vulnerability.
</p>
<p>
Questions that might be frequently asked:
</p>
<p>
How would I know if I am the victim of this attack?
</p>
<p>
Your bitcoin process would stop processing blocks and would have a
different block count from the rest of the network (you can see the
current block count at websites like blockexplorer.com or
blockchain.info). Eventually it would display the message:
</p>
<blockquote>WARNING: Displayed transactions may not be correct! You may need to
upgrade, or other nodes may need to upgrade.</blockquote>
<p>
(note that this message is displayed whenever your bitcoin process
detects that the rest of the network seems to have a different
block count, which can happen for several reasons unrelated to
this vulnerability).
</p>
<p>
Could this bug be used to steal my wallet?
</p>
<p>
No.
</p>
<p>
Could this bug be used to install malware on my system?
</p>
<p>
No.
</p>
<div style="text-align:right">
<i>This notice last updated: Mon May 14 17:00:00 UTC 2012</i>
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