AI found a way to crash bitcoin nodes on Windows and Macs. It's now public
Source: CoinDesk ·
From the source
Three flaws a language-model scan dug up are the first disclosed under Core’s new rules for bugs that are easy to find. Bitcoin Core’s decision to stop sitting on bugs an AI could find has already put three of them out in the open, including one that lets a stranger crash nodes running on Windows and Mac computers. The flaw, initially flagged by an AI scan on Oct. 23 , let any computer connected to a bitcoin node running Windows, macOS or BSD flood that node with data until it ran out of memory and crashed. Developers confirmed it the day it was found, shipped fixes on Oct. 27 and published the details on Wednesday, along with two other bugs the scan had turned up. A node is the software that checks and relays every bitcoin transaction, and Bitcoin Core is the program most nodes run. Until last week , Core developers kept medium-severity flaws like this one secret for as long as a year, to give operators time to upgrade before attackers learned where to look. That changed on Oct. 22…