What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2017-9230
- Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.0)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 3.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2017-05-24 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-338
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
Affected products
- Bitcoin: all versions
References
- http://www.mit.edu/~jlrubin//public/pdfs/Asicboost.pdf
- http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/98657
- https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.00575.pdf
- https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/013996.html
- https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-May/014349.html
- https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-May/014351.html
- https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-May/014352.html
- http://www.mit.edu/~jlrubin//public/pdfs/Asicboost.pdf
- http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/98657
- https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.00575.pdf
- https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/013996.html
- https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-May/014349.html
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