Over the past few weeks, the Ethereum network has experienced a prolonged assault. The perpetrator(s) have been quite clever in identifying weaknesses in both client implementations and the protocol documentation.
Although the recent updates have resulted in an overall enhancement in the resilience of client implementations, the attacks have also highlighted the need for a more fundamental modification to the EVM pricing structure.
For numerous users, the most apparent effect is likely their struggles in having transactions incorporated into blocks, while full nodes are encountering memory restrictions in managing the inflated state.
This outlines our plan to tackle these challenges:
- As a provisional step to reduce the impact of the latest attack, we advise all miners to decrease the gas limit to 500K gas.
- A hard fork based on EIP 150 version 1c will be activated at block
2457000[refer below]. This will adjust the pricing of certain operations to more accurately reflect the underlying computational complexity. - A subsequent hard fork will follow soon after, intended to reverse the current “state-bloat” caused by the attacks. This second fork will aim to eliminate accounts that are empty; devoid of code, balance, storage, and nonce == 0.
We have executed the necessary modifications in the clients and are presently enhancing and adding tests to prevent the emergence of consensus-breaking vulnerabilities.
As a reminder, the Ethereum Bug Bounty is currently active and includes the new hard fork implementations.
EDIT: The fork block has been rescheduled to 2463000 to allow for further testing.
