Tendermint Says Last Month's Cosmos Vulnerability Exposed Security Loophole

The developers behind the Cosmos network released today a full disclosure of last month's "Critical security vulnerability" which reportedly enabled hackers to bypass certain penalties for misbehavior on the network.

Normally, Cosmos validators - which are the equivalent to miners on a proof-of-work blockchain network - that do misbehave either by voting haphazardly or signing off on false transactions are penalized by having their staked ATOM tokens slashed.

As stated in today's post by the Tendermint team, the code vulnerability discovered last month could enable a validator to bypass the full un-staking or "Un-bonding" period "And have their funds immediately become liquid essentially insta-unbonding."

Having gone live this past March, Cosmos is a relatively new blockchain network that is designed to improve the interoperability between differing blockchain platforms.

The security vulnerability disclosed today was actually found in "The staking module" of the Cosmos Software Development Kit which debuted back in 2018 as a "State-of-the-art" blockchain toolkit.

Jessy Irwin, Tendermint's head of security, said in interview with CoinDesk that while the vulnerability disclosed today is the first of its kind to impact the Cosmos main network, "It's not the first bug that has been reported to us."

The vulnerability, now fully patched on the Cosmos network, did require Cosmos validators to execute an emergency hard fork or system-wide upgrade.

Irwin highlighted that in order for this hard fork to execute successfully without resulting in a network split, urgent notice need to be pushed to all Cosmos validators and other service providers who were running Cosmos software on their computers.

Moving forward, Irwin told CoinDesk that one of the biggest lessons learnt from the security disclosure and upgrade process was a greater need for secure communication channels with Cosmos validators and other service providers.

"We're really going to be advocating for our hub of validators and exchanges to open up their own channels for security communications We are working really hard with our validator set to open that up so that next time we're not running around and scrambling for information to get in touch with them."