HomeCryptoMonero Burning Bug, the error that destroyed tokens

Monero Burning Bug, the error that destroyed tokens

Those who use the wallets of online exchanges to store or send Monero (XMR) may have noticed some malfunctions or even a block these days.

In fact, some exchanges including Bittrex, Poloniex and Cryptopia, have temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals on XMR wallets due to a bug discovered right within the Monero network.

The bug was discovered by the developers of the Monero team who seem to have reported the problem to the exchanges so that they could temporarily suspend the activities of the wallets.

The bug has been fixed and so now there should be no more problems with the cryptocurrency’s blockchain.

But what was the discovered bug? The so-called “Burning Bug” was a vulnerability that would allow malicious people to destroy XMR tokens by sending multiple payments to the same stealth address.

In this way, the recipient would be able to spend the received tokens, but those sent with additional transactions would be unavailable: such transactions would, in fact, produce duplicate keys that would be rejected by the network as suspected double-spending attacks.

Using this bug, an attacker could send XMR tokens to an exchange, trade them for other cryptocurrencies, and withdraw them on their own external wallet.

However, when the exchange wanted to use those tokens by sending them to some other wallet it would be blocked, losing them.

The attacker would not have gained any advantage for themselves, but they could have seriously damaged the exchange and all its users.

The bug was found in the Monero wallet software and that’s why those wallets were temporarily blocked.

Moreover, the basic structure of the exploit had been known for some time, but only recently have the developers been able to accurately identify the bug and fix it.

The news of the bug does not appear to have had an impact on the market value of XMR, even though it was only announced shortly before the bug was fixed.

Currently trading at $114, XMR is down 3%, while most other large capitalized cryptocurrencies are down at least 5%.

Marco Cavicchioli
Marco Cavicchioli
"Classe 1975, Marco è stato il primo a fare divulgazione su YouTube in Italia riguardo Bitcoin. Ha fondato ilBitcoin.news ed il gruppo Facebook "Bitcoin Italia (aperto e senza scam)".
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