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The Ethereum developers announced yesterday that they are pulling back the Constantinople Hard Fork Upgrade after a vulnerability that could allow hackers to steal users’ funds was reported. This upgrade was scheduled to launch today, January 16th.

This issue, known as the ‘reentrancy attack’ in the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1283. was identified by a smart contract audit firm ChainSecurity. They also reported about the bug in detail in a Medium blog post yesterday.

According to the Ethereum official blog, “Security researchers like ChainSecurity and TrailOfBits ran (and are still running) analysis across the entire blockchain. They did not find any cases of this vulnerability in the wild. However, there is still a non-zero risk that some contracts could be affected.”

According to a statement by Ethereum Core Developers and the Ethereum Security Community, “Because the risk is non-zero and the amount of time required to determine the risk with confidence is longer the amount of time available before the planned Constantinople upgrade, a decision was reached to postpone the fork out of an abundance of caution.”

The blog posted by ChainSecurity explained the cause of the potential vulnerability and have also suggested how smart contracts can be tested for vulnerabilities. The blog highlighted that the EIP-1283 introduces cheaper gas cost for SSTORE operations. If the upgrade took place, the smart contracts on the chain could have utilized code patterns that would make them vulnerable to re-entrancy attack. However, these smart contracts would not have been vulnerable before the attack.

Afri Schoedon, the hard fork coordinator at Ethereum said, “We will decide (sic) further steps on Friday in the all-core-devs call. For now it will not happen this week. Stay tuned for instructions.”

To know more about this news in detail, visit the Ethereum official blog.

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