How one developer saved Avalanche from a $24 billion “instant death”!

A malicious actor could have taken down the entire Avalanche network for less than $200,000. A vulnerability, which has since been patched, allowing the Avalanche blockchain to be destroyed has been revealed.

Ethereum developer Péter Szilágyi released a report on Thursday about the Avalanche vulnerability, detailing a critical bug he discovered in the Avalanche network’s code earlier this year. In the report dated March 29, 2022, Szilágyi explained how Avalanche was vulnerable to an attack by sending a packet PeerList malicious to nodes and validators in the network.

Hypothetically, an attacker could have started a new validator node, sent malicious packets to other nodes and validators, and instantly brought down the entire Avalanche network. “Since all nodes in the network connect to all validators, this is practically instant death for the entire network“, writes Szilágyi.

Although such an attack would have cost 2,000 AVAX tokens to fund the new validation node, that would have been a small price to pay for the potential chaos such an action could have produced. Péter Szilágyi explained that a malicious actor could easily recoup the cost by opening a short position on AVAX prior to the attack, essentially taking the network down at no cost. When the vulnerability was discovered, 2,000 AVAX tokens could have been purchased for about $179,000. At the same time, Avalanche’s market capitalization was over $24 billion.

How did Péter Szilágyi discover the vulnerability? “I was trying to get an idea of how the [Avalanche] And I found the package management a little peculiar for my taste.” he explained. “So I wrote a fuzzer to see if I could muffle it. It went boom pretty quickly.“After discovering the bug, Szilágyi contacted the Avalanche developer team, who quickly fixed it a day later in the avalanchego v1.7.9 update.

Avalanche is one of many Layer 1 networks that have skyrocketed in popularity during the 2021 bull market. In response to rising fees on Ethereum’s core network, users flocked to competing smart contract-enabled networks to participate in DeFi and mint NFTs for a fraction of what it costs on Ethereum. The network-native AVAX token hit an all-time high of $144.96 on Nov. 21, 2021, after trading at about $3.21 earlier this year. In 2022, its price suffered along with the rest of the crypto-currency market in response to Federal Reserve interest rate hikes and deteriorating macroeconomic conditions. AVAX is currently trading at around $18.81.