HackerOne report stating that the Tron Foundation had disclosed a serious vulnerability in its blockchain. The company immediately issued a patch that fixed the vulnerability.
The Tron Foundation revealed on May 2 that the security had been successfully addressed and provided some details.
The vulnerability was discovered earlier this year and the process to find a solution began immediately. If it had not been addressed and was discovered and exploited by a hacker, it could have caused significant damage to the platform.
Exploiting the vulnerability could allow an attacker to flood the network with malicious requests, which in turn would exhaust the network's memory, making it vulnerable to other attacks.
If the memory were full, the hacker could deploy malicious code and carry out a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack.
The attacker could use a single machine to attack all or most of the nodes. If someone were to launch a DDOS attack on all or even 51% of the SR nodes, the Tron network would no longer be available. It would be unusable.
The vulnerability was discovered by a security researcher who then informed the Tron Foundation. The company gave him a $1,500 reward.
The discovery was made in early January and was first reported on January 14. However, because it was a very critical vulnerability, Tron did not want to disclose it immediately. It wanted to address it first.
In 2018, several cryptocurrency partnered with white hat hackers and rewarded them for discovering vulnerabilities in their services. The total rewards reached $878,000.
Tron gave out the third largest reward ($76,200) in its bug bounty program in 2018.
Cryptocurrency platforms should be constantly on the alert, as there have been more and more hacker attacks in recent years.
