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HIGH

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

Published May 24, 2017

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

Remediation

No remediation recorded yet.

Metrics

Weaknesses (1)

References (7)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner mitre
Published May 24, 2017
Updated Aug 5, 2024
Reserved May 24, 2017
CISA Vulnrichment
Updated Apr 23, 2024
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Red Hat
Severity n/a
Public date n/a