Security firm Halborn warns that over 280 blockchains are at risk of zero-day exploits

Updated: 14 March 2023

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Security company Halborn recently published a warning, indicating that more than 280 different blockchain networks are currently in danger of zero-day exploits that could potentially endanger nearly $25 billion in digital assets. The company published its warning in a tweet yesterday, March 13th, stating that it has discovered massive zero-day impacting Dogecoin, as well as over 280 other networks.

The warning says that Litecoin and Zcash are also on the list, with their digital assets also at risk. Going further into detail, the company named the vulnerability “Rab13s,” noting that it has already contacted several blockchain, including Dogecoin, Litecoin, and Zcash, in order to institute a fix for the flaw.

🚨 Halborn discovered massive #ZeroDay impacting Dogecoin and 280+ networks including Litecoin and Zcash, putting over $25 Billion of digital assets at risk!

🧵👇…

— Halborn (@HalbornSecurity) March 13, 2023

What happened?

Halborn noted that it discovered the vulnerability as part of its evaluation of Dogecoin, which started a year ago, in March 2022. During the process, it identified several vulnerabilities, which have been reported to Dogecoin’s team and fixed. However, they found that some of these flaws also exist on more than 280 other networks. Since then, several of them were notified, and the issues were patched.

2/ During the assessment, it was found that the same vulns affected over 280 other networks including #litecoin and #zcash, which have since then been addressed and patched.

— Halborn (@HalbornSecurity) March 13, 2023

“The most critical vulnerability discovered is related to peer-to-peer (p2p) communications where attackers can craft consensus messages and send it to individual nodes, taking them offline. Halborn researchers, led by @safe_buffer, have code-named this vulnerability #Rab13s.”

Of course, the company has made an effort to contact all of the affected networks and notify them of the flaws. It also encouraged them to reach out to the firm.

How bad is it?

As for the consequences of the failure to address the flaws, the company noted that the vulnerabilities were found in the P2P messaging mechanisms. It warned that bad actors could use the vulnerabilities to send malicious consensus messages to each node and cause them to shut down. This would reduce the network’s defense, leaving it wide open to a fairly weak 51% attacks.

Apart from that, the Halborn team also warned that attackers could use a public interface to execute code as normal node users. It noted that the likelihood of this particular exploit is lowe, since doing so requires valid credentials.

The company also suggested remediation by upgrading all UTXO-based nodes to the latest version, which is currently 1.14.6. The company added that the issue is quite severe, so it will not issue technical details of the exploit at this time. However, it did note that not all vulnerabilities are exploitable on all of the affected networks, thanks to their codebase differences.

But, the number of flaws and their severity are certainly putting all of the affected networks in real danger of suffering security breaches.

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