Parity Admits to "Critical" Vulnerability in Testnet That Could Corrupt Ethereum

Users of Parity Ethereum were warned to update after a "Critical" consensus issue was discovered - one that could potentially corrupt up to 30% of the world's second most successful blockchain.

Alert: Please update your Parity Ethereum clients to 1.11.3-beta or 1.10.6-stable asap.

"In the worst case, submitting a certain malformed transaction to a mining Parity Ethereum node could have caused that node to produce a malformed block, which would still be treated as valid by other affected Parity Ethereum nodes."

If the error remained unnoticed, users of the Parity Ethereum client would fall out of sync with the wider network - leading to rejected transactions and a chain split.

According to the public record of Parity-based Ethereum nodes, this failure would affect nearly a third of the entire Ethereum network.

Now, all users must update to an amended version of the third-party Ethereum client - or they risk corrupting the Ethereum mainnet.

"Please update your nodes as soon as possible and then double check that you are running version 1.10.6-stable or 1.11.3-beta."

This is not the first time Parity admitted a critical failure.

Although Parity expressed deep remorse for the latter error, the failure seemingly could have been avoided.

As institutions and individuals are seduced with faster, more robust blockchains, the Ethereum Foundation may begin eliminating the weak links.