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High · 7.5 CVE-2017-9230 EUVD-2017-18168GHSA-hx58-x97g-cc9p

The Bitcoin Proof-of-Work algorithm does not consider a certain attack methodology related to 80-byte block headers with a variety of initi…

Published May 24, 2017 · Updated Aug 5, 2024 · Assigned by mitre

Description

The Bitcoin Proof-of-Work algorithm does not consider a certain attack methodology related to 80-byte block headers with a variety of initial 64-byte chunks followed by the same 16-byte chunk, multiple candidate root values ending with the same 4 bytes, and calculations involving sqrt numbers. This violates the security assumptions of (1) the choice of input, outside of the dedicated nonce area, fed into the Proof-of-Work function should not change its difficulty to evaluate and (2) every Proof-of-Work function execution should be independent. NOTE: a number of persons feel that this methodology is a benign mining optimization, not a vulnerability

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