Ethereum Developer Discovers Vulnerability In Shapella Test Networks Empty Block Synchronization

ByDorah Lilian

Feb 17, 2023 ETH, Ethereum, Shanghai Upgrade

Read Time:2 Minute, 0 Second

On Friday, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko announced that developer Marius VanDerWijden discovered a vulnerability in the public test network Shapella.
With the Shanghai-Capella upgrade, Ethereum’s network will have a stronger base on which to grow in the future.

On Friday, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko announced that developer Marius VanDerWijden discovered a vulnerability in the public test network Shapella. The problem manifested itself during the full synchronization of empty blocks with no transactions or withdrawals.

The last 4 and a half stressful hours of debugging culminated in this amazing bug fix. We got reports that geth nodes wouldn’t sync the Zhejiang devnet correctly. The issue was that if a block body was empty (no tx, no withdrawals) we wouldn’t initialize it correctly.

VanDerWijden stated:

Tim Beiko said the flaw can be “easily rectified” and called the test “simple.” For this, the Shanghai developers will notably implement a Hive test.

The Zhejiang testnet primary goal is to test Ethereum staking withdrawals and BLS, a digital signature scheme used to prevent forgery. In Ethereum’s testnet, the validators sign and attest blocks to ensure that all of them follow the consensus rules. Using a signature scheme like BLS can help to address this problem.

Verifying those on-chain signatures may lead to more issues as the number of validators keeps increasing. Tim Beiko Stated:

The devnet had 600k validators, and 360k of them perform withdrawal credential updates right at the fork.

With the Shanghai-Capella upgrade, Ethereum’s network will have a stronger base on which to grow in the future. Investor euphoria may result from this, enabling the second-largest cryptocurrency to briefly hit new annual highs.