Vulnerability found in Babylon staking code could slow block production

A newly discovered vulnerability may enable malicious validators to omit the hash field when posting blocks, leading to validator crashes and slowing block production.

A newly disclosed software flaw in the Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon may allow malicious validators to disrupt parts of the network’s consensus process, potentially slowing block production during key periods, according to developers.

The vulnerability affects Babylon’s block signature scheme, known as the BLS vote extension, which is used to prove that validators have agreed on a block.

The bug enables malicious validators to intentionally omit the block hash field when sending their vote extension, which could lead to validator consensus issues during the epoch boundaries of the network, according to a GitHub post published on Thursday.

Read more