Babylon协议 staking Bitcoin phát hiện lỗ hổng quan trọng: Người xác thực độc hại có thể làm chậm quá trình tạo khối

【BitTui】Bitcoin staking ecosystem faces technical risks again. The development team recently disclosed a critical software vulnerability in the Babylon protocol on GitHub — this flaw is hidden in the BLS voting extension scheme, which was originally designed to ensure validators reach consensus on blocks.

The key issue lies in the block signature mechanism. Validators need to attach a block hash field when voting to indicate which blocks they support. However, this vulnerability allows malicious nodes to directly skip this field when sending voting extensions. It may sound inconsequential, but the consequences are troubling — when this occurs during critical consensus checks at epoch boundaries, other validators may crash due to receiving incomplete information.

Imagine if multiple validators are triggered by this issue simultaneously, the block generation speed of the entire network would slow down noticeably. This is not a hypothetical threat — developers explicitly stated that although no one has been observed actively exploiting this vulnerability yet, if not patched promptly, malicious exploitation is only a matter of time.

For Babylon and the Bitcoin staking ecosystem, this is a timely wake-up call. The security of staking protocols directly affects validator rewards and the stability of the entire network, and any vulnerabilities at the consensus level could potentially escalate into systemic risks.