CVEvulnerability

CVE-2017-9230

7.5 HIGH Published 2017-05-24 Modified 2026-06-17 Official page ↗
Status
Modified
Published
2017-05-24
Last modified
2026-06-17
Assigner
[email protected]
CVSS 3.1 (134c704f-9b21-4f2e-91b3-4a467353bcc0)
7.5 HIGH — CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS 3.0 ([email protected])
7.5 HIGH — CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.0 ([email protected])
5.0 MEDIUM — AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N
Weaknesses
CWE-338

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 configurations

• bitcoin bitcoin

Related

Weakness · CWE (1)

  • CWE-338 Use of Cryptographically Weak Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG) weakness

References