Riptide, a white hat hacker that found a vulnerability on Arbitrum, tweeted that his discover was eligible for the max bounty reward of $2 million as a substitute of the 400 ETH ($53,000) reward he acquired.
No large deal simply bridging a cool $470mm by means of the identical Inbox contract 👀
Positively must be eligible for a max bounty
— riptide (@0xriptide) September 20, 2022
Ethereum scaling instrument Arbitrum escaped a multimillion-dollar hack after the hacker noticed a vulnerability within the bridge connecting the layer2 community to ETH’s mainnet. The vulnerability affected how transactions are submitted and processed on the community and would have allowed malicious gamers to steal all of the funds despatched to the layer2 community.
The vulnerability
In accordance to the white hat hacker, incoming transactions to Arbitrum by means of the bridge could possibly be hijacked by malicious gamers who may set their tackle because the recipient tackle.
Riptide continued that such an exploit may have gone undetected for a very long time if the hacker focused solely giant ETH deposits, or they may have simply front-ran the subsequent main ETH deposit.
On condition that the most important deposit on the inbox contract within the final 24 hours was 168,000 ETH ($250 million), exploiting the vulnerability may have led to a lack of tons of of thousands and thousands.
Bounty reward
Whereas Riptide initially praised Arbitrum for the 400 ETH reward, the white hat hacker later tweeted that his work deserved the utmost bounty of $2 million.
Riptide mentioned:
“My level is that in case you publish a $2mm bounty — be ready to pay it when it’s justified. In any other case, simply say the max bounty is 400 ETH and be achieved with it. Hackers watch which tasks pay out and which don’t. IMO not a good suggestion to incentivize a whitehat to go blackhat.”
Riptide’s new feedback had been made after a Twitter person confirmed that the bridge was lately used to switch over $400 million.
Doing this once more since my different quote tweet acquired censored by tweeter. Arbitrum bridge bug is important bridge bug #3 attributable to unhealthy initializers, in case we would have liked another excuse to do away with initializers. Shocked Arbitrum solely paid 400 ETH and never max bounty given deposits like: https://t.co/Lx32UVjDtF pic.twitter.com/cmSx1HMI1k
— smartcontracts.eth (✨🔴_🔴✨) (@kelvinfichter) September 20, 2022
In the meantime, bridge exploits are one of many greatest safety issues within the crypto trade presently. Assaults on bridges have led to the loss of just about $1 billion previously yr alone.