Cryptocurrency ‘minting’ flaw could have leached money from exchanges – Naked Security

Are Ethereum’s new-fangled smart contracts the ultimate point of the blockchain or a risky experiment whose vulnerabilities presage trouble?

Right now, few doubt that smart contracts – instruction workflows in a language called Solidity that automate complex, profitable processes on Ethereum – require close scrutiny.

The latest security flaw was discovered by smart contract developers Level K – a ‘minting’ flaw that would allow an attacker to drain Ethereum exchanges initiating smart contracts.

There are several scenarios in which the vulnerability could be exploited, which has already been revealed to most of the exchanges the researchers thought might be affected.

Explaining gas

Before getting to the weakness, it’s necessary to understand that on the Ethereum network sending Ether cryptocurrency from one address to another means paying a minimum fee to miners in a unit called ‘gas’.

This rewards miners according to the amount of computation involved in…