![]() ![]() Since the bundle bug revealed portions of the affected users’ private keys, it is theoretically possible that a savvy hacker might have been able to brute-force the remainder of the private key and submitted a reclaim for someone else’s tokens. We cannot rule out, however, that some duplicate reclaims might represent attempts by thieves to steal the tokens of other legitimate users. Our working assumption is that many of the double reclaims amount to simple innocent mistakes of this sort. Or perhaps the user wasn’t sure if the first request had successfully been recorded, so s/he submitted a second one out of an abundance of caution. Perhaps the user did this because s/he had meanwhile used Address A for something else (and everyone knows you should never use an IOTA address more than once!). For example, a user attempting to reclaim his or her tokens might have submitted a reclaim request asking to have the tokens sent to new Address A, then later submitted a second reclaim request asking to have the same tokens sent to new Address B. In certain cases (around 200), more than one person submitted a reclaim for the same IOTA address. But it also poses special challenges when it comes to completing the token reclaim process. ![]() This privacy-by-default design fosters permissionless innovation within the IOTA Ecosystem, and this is something we are very proud of. ![]() For this reason, neither the IOTA Foundation nor anyone else who contributes to or uses IOTA has any way of knowing - on the basis of the protocol alone - who owns which individual IOTA addresses. It is a bedrock commitment which the IOTA community shares in common with many of the leading open source projects in the blockchain and distributed ledger space. Permissionless innovation is one of the core features of IOTA’s design. The fact that IOTA is a public, permissionless distributed ledger means that users can create wallets, obtain IOTA tokens, and send and receive transactions via the Tangle without ever having to notify or share their personal details with anyone. The double reclaim problem: why some reclaims need to go through identity verification Many users have already received their tokens back through the reclaim process, while others are still waiting (more on that in a minute!). A further update on the reclaim process was then provided on 9 November 2017. The rescued tokens were then made subject to a reclaim process which was announced in an IOTA blog post on 25 October 2017. Motivated by the belief that rescuing the at-risk tokens was the right thing to do, the full node operators - some of whom remain anonymous - unanimously opted to validate the snapshot and rescue the at-risk tokens. Rather, the idea was proposed and debated by the community of IOTA developers and then put to a vote by the entire network of IOTA full-node operators worldwide. It is important to stress that this step was not taken lightly and was not carried out by any single individual or organization. (A general explanation of snapshots in IOTA can be found on the Hello IOTA Forum.) In this case, however, the community took the unprecedented decision to carry out a snapshot that would essentially wipe out the effects of the bug by sweeping the at-risk tokens to new, safe addresses from which they could be returned to the original owners via a reclaim process. In the current version of the Tangle’s deployment, snapshots are carried out on a periodic basis to prune the ledger and make it faster by removing all zero-balance addresses. Over the course of three days, the coordinator was shut down (to make it more difficult for any brute force attacks to be confirmed), a patch was deployed, and the community of full node operators reached a consensus to carry out an emergency snapshot to prevent the loss of any user tokens. The IOTA open source community quickly came together to develop a patch for this bug. This would have made it easier for malicious attackers to potentially “brute force” hack the remainder of those addresses’ private keys and thereby steal the tokens. For the less technically-minded, the upshot is that the bug put the IOTA tokens of certain users at risk by partially revealing a portion of the private key generated for specific addresses. The details are highly technical, but the intrepid may check out Eric Hop’s excellent blog post on the IOTA signing process to fully understand them. ![]() Background on the reclaim process - the bundle bugĪs most members of the IOTA Community know, in October of 2017 a bug was found in the early normalization code for IOTA transaction signature bundles. ![]()
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