Recently, an interesting technical discovery has caught attention. The Babylon project disclosed a serious vulnerability on GitHub—specifically in the BLS voting extension handling logic.

According to public information, this issue was discovered and reported on December 9th of last year. What is the core of the problem? Attackers can play tricks when sending blocks: intentionally deleting the block hash field. The consequences of this are quite serious—other validators will crash during network synchronization, and the ultimate effect is a significant slowdown in the block production speed of the entire network.

From a security rating perspective, this is marked as high risk. The affected range includes all versions before 4.2.0. So far, there have been no reports of anyone actually exploiting this vulnerability, but that doesn’t mean no one has discovered it—mainly because such attacks require the attacker to have validator privileges.

The key issue is that this involves the stability of the network consensus layer. If validators can arbitrarily cause network nodes to crash, it could pose risks to the decentralized operation of the blockchain. Fortunately, the official team has already become aware of this problem, and the updated versions should have fixed it. For users, the main thing is to upgrade to the latest version and avoid staying on outdated versions.