Three Vulnerabilities Discovered in Bitcoin Core

• Versions 29.5, 30.4, 31.2, and 32.1 of Bitcoin Core now have security patches.
• The findings are framed within a recent global cybersecurity crisis.

The IT sector is experiencing what Charles Guillemet, CTO of Ledger, has described as a terrifying landscape of global cybersecurity.

Following an incessant wave of attacks that, according to previous reports from CriptoNoticias, have compromised everything from PHP-based web infrastructure to institutional tools, the Bitcoin Core development team has revealed the existence of three new vulnerabilities in the most widely used client software of the network.

Although the Bitcoin protocol proved to be completely immune to the external technical failures that compromised a large part of internet servers during this critical month, the core of its own system also faced threats.

Paradoxically, while criminal groups used artificial intelligence to infiltrate massive corporate networks throughout October, in this case, automation proved vital for defense.

The flaws in the code were proactively identified through an automated scan of language models led by Project Loupe, a security initiative from the firm Spiral. This effort was complemented by parallel reports from researchers such as L0rinc, a member of the Bitcoin Red Team, and Andrew Dorman.

The vulnerabilities include two medium-severity flaws due to memory exhaustion and one low-severity flaw in the chain files. The first flaw consists of an unlimited memory growth caused by peers that simulate not supporting the BIP 31 communication standard.

By strategically delaying message reading and evading the system that disconnects inactive nodes after 20 minutes, an attacker can grow the data queue without limit, consuming up to 5 MB per hour on outgoing connections.

The second vulnerability exclusively affects platforms that do not operate under the Linux system. Attackers can send urgent data through the TCP protocol to bypass the processing limit mechanism and queue an excessive amount of information.

This action allows trivial blocking of any node operating on Windows, macOS, or BSD operating systems. Linux users are not affected because the program uses a different monitoring code on that system.

The third error involves a data overflow of the rollback data, which is used to disconnect transactions during a chain reorganization (reorg). These files were stored in 32-bit integers and did not have a formal size limit. A miner could generate malicious blocks whose data volume exceeds 4 GiB, causing the ledger to collapse and new information to overwrite the old. In the event of a reorg, the attacked node would lose the ability to read the information and would shut down automatically.

The correction patches were released on October 27 and 28 through versions 29.5, 30.4, 31.2, and 32.1 of Bitcoin Core.

Despite these structural updates, computers with 32-bit operating systems and nodes storing blocks on FAT32 formatted disks remain exposed to overflows due to inherent limitations of those environments to read files larger than 4 GiB.

Those maintaining hardware with these legacy configurations could suffer unrecoverable automatic shutdowns in the program, making it imperative to update the software and physically transition to modern 64-bit infrastructures to maintain operation on the network.

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