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On-chain competition is always watching, but sometimes it will be forced to help.
Offchain Labs, the core team behind the Ethereum layer-2 network scaling Arbitrationrecently discovered several security issues in a testnet version of Optimisma separate layer 2 Ethereum scaling network created by OP Labs.
Once the fixes were implemented, the issues were detailed Friday in a blog post published by Ed Felton, co-founder of Offchain Labs. Because the potential vulnerability was discovered in Optimism’s system for disputing potentially fraudulent transactions, it could have been exploited by bad actors, Felton explained.
“We believe that if your current protocol were deployed on mainnet, it would put user funds at very high risk,” Offchain Labs told OP Labs in a late March post, adding that a “sample code of exploitation” had been included for information purposes. .
Arbitrage and optimism are what we call Ethereum accumulations, intended to provide lower transaction costs to users by aggregating batches of transactions and then relaying them to Ethereum in a processed form. Within this class of scaling solutions, both Layer 2s are classified as “optimistic” rollups, which assume that all transactions they process are legitimate.
To prevent bad actors from abusing the optimistic nature of Arbitrum and Optimism, both networks use evidence of fraud. This is because the security model gives network participants a window to challenge transactions and verify their validity through a rules-based process.
The issues identified by Offchain Labs related to the amount of time participants were given to “take action” to dispute transactions through Optimism’s fraud prevention system. By abusing this timing to their advantage, a bad actor could have tricked the system into accepting fraudulent channel history, or prevented it from accepting the correct channel history, according to Felton’s post.
“The OP protocol as initially deployed on testnet was susceptible to traitor attacks of this type because it allowed a traitor to obtain time credit he did not deserve,” he explained. “The result was that the anti-fraud system did not improve security guarantees.”
Offchain Labs’ intervention with Optimism comes as Ethereum layers 2 continue to make new uses of “blobs.” Introduced in the latest Ethereum upgrade, the data structure allows Layer 2s to further save on transaction costs with cheap, dedicated space to publish data to Ethereum.
From an adoption perspective, Optimism and Arbitrum are two of the most important among Ethereum Layer 2s. According to a Dune dashboard, for example, Arbitrum and Optimism processed 1.7 million and 600,000 transactions respectively on Monday. Meanwhile, the Ethereum mainnet recorded 1.1 million transactions.
While the security issues may have caused headaches for users down the line, removing them from Optimism’s testnet means that ultimately no one was affected. Regarding layer 2s with comparable architectures that monitor each other, an OP Labs spokesperson said. Decrypt that the recent contribution from Offchain Labs was still very much appreciated.
“We always appreciate when teams take the time to review our testnet code,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “It’s an essential part of the development process.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
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