Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures

CVE	Announced	Affects	Severity	Attack is...	Flaw	Net
CVE-2010-5137	2010-07-28	wxBitcoin and bitcoind	DoS	Easy	OP_LSHIFT crash	100%
CVE-2010-5141	2010-07-28	wxBitcoin and bitcoind	Theft	Easy		100%
CVE-2010-5138	2010-07-29	wxBitcoin and bitcoind	DoS	Easy	Unlimited SigOp DoS	100%
CVE-2010-5139	2010-08-15	wxBitcoin and bitcoind	Theft	Easy	Combined output overflow	100%
CVE-2010-5140	2010-09-29	wxBitcoin and bitcoind	DoS	Easy	Never confirming transactions	100%
CVE-2011-4447	2011-11-11	wxBitcoin and bitcoind	Exposure	Hard	Wallet non-encryption	98%
CVE-2012-1909	2012-03-07	Bitcoin protocol and all clients	Netsplit	Very hard	Transaction overwriting	92%
CVE-2012-1910	2012-03-17	Bitcoin-Qt for Windows	Unknown	Hard	MingW non-multithreading	99%
BIP 0016	2012-04-01	All Bitcoin clients	Fake Conf	Miners	Mandatory P2SH protocol update	92%
CVE-2012-2459	2012-05-14	bitcoind and Bitcoin-Qt	Netsplit	Easy	Block hash collision (via merkle root)	92%
CVE-2012-3789	2012-06-20	bitcoind and Bitcoin-Qt	DoS	Easy	(Lack of) orphan txn resource limits	83%
BIP 0034	Future	All Bitcoin clients	Fake Conf	Miners	Mandatory block protocol update	66%
CVE-2012-4682		bitcoind and Bitcoin-Qt	DoS			66%
CVE-2012-4683		bitcoind and Bitcoin-Qt	DoS			66%

CVE-2010-5137

Date: 2010-07-28
Summary: OP_LSHIFT crash
Fix Deployment: 100%

Affected		Fix
bitcoind wxBitcoin	* - 0.3.4	0.3.5

On July 28 2010, two bugs were discovered and demonstrated on the test network. One caused bitcoin to crash on some machines when processing a transaction containing an OP_LSHIFT. This was never exploited on the main network, and was fixed by Bitcoin version 0.3.5.

After these bugs were discovered, many currently-unused script words were disabled for safety.

References

• US-CERT/NIST

CVE-2010-5141

Date: 2010-07-28
Summary: ?
Fix Deployment: 100%

Affected		Fix
bitcoind wxBitcoin	* - 0.3.4	0.3.5

On July 28 2010, two bugs were discovered and demonstrated on the test network. One exploited a bug in the transaction handling code and allowed an attacker to spend coins that they did not own. This was never exploited on the main network, and was fixed by Bitcoin version 0.3.5.

After these bugs were discovered, many currently-unused script words were disabled for safety.

References

• US-CERT/NIST

CVE-2010-5138

Date: 2010-07-29
Summary: Unlimited SigOp DoS
Fix Deployment: 100%

Affected		Fix
bitcoind wxBitcoin	* - 0.3.?	0.3.?

On July 29 2010, it was discovered that block 71036 contained several transactions with a ton of OP_CHECKSIG commands. There should only ever be one such command. This caused every node to do extra unnecessary work, and it could have been used as a denial-of-service attack. A new version of Bitcoin was quickly released. The new version did not cause a fork on the main network, though it did cause one on the test network (where someone had played around with the attack more).

References

• US-CERT/NIST

CVE-2010-5139

Date: 2010-08-15
Summary: Combined output overflow
Fix Deployment: 100%

Affected		Fix
bitcoind wxBitcoin	* - 0.3.10	0.3.11

On August 15 2010, it was discovered that block 74638 contained a transaction that created over 184 billion bitcoins for two different addresses. This was possible because the code used for checking transactions before including them in a block didn't account for the case of outputs so large that they overflowed when summed. A new version was published within a few hours of the discovery. The block chain had to be forked. Although many unpatched nodes continued to build on the "bad" block chain, the "good" block chain overtook it at a block height of 74691. The bad transaction no longer exists for people using the longest chain.

The block and transaction:

CBlock(hash=0000000000790ab3, ver=1, hashPrevBlock=0000000000606865, hashMerkleRoot=618eba,
nTime=1281891957, nBits=1c00800e, nNonce=28192719, vtx=2)
  CTransaction(hash=012cd8, ver=1, vin.size=1, vout.size=1, nLockTime=0)
    CTxIn(COutPoint(000000, -1), coinbase 040e80001c028f00)
    CTxOut(nValue=50.51000000, scriptPubKey=0x4F4BA55D1580F8C3A8A2C7)
  CTransaction(hash=1d5e51, ver=1, vin.size=1, vout.size=2, nLockTime=0)
    CTxIn(COutPoint(237fe8, 0), scriptSig=0xA87C02384E1F184B79C6AC)
    CTxOut(nValue=92233720368.54275808, scriptPubKey=OP_DUP OP_HASH160 0xB7A7)
    CTxOut(nValue=92233720368.54275808, scriptPubKey=OP_DUP OP_HASH160 0x1512)
  vMerkleTree: 012cd8 1d5e51 618eba

Block hash: 0000000000790ab3f22ec756ad43b6ab569abf0bddeb97c67a6f7b1470a7ec1c
Transaction hash: 1d5e512a9723cbef373b970eb52f1e9598ad67e7408077a82fdac194b65333c9

References

• Discovery
• US-CERT/NIST

CVE-2010-5140

Date: 2010-09-29
Summary: Never confirming transactions
Fix Deployment: 100%

Affected		Fix
bitcoind wxBitcoin	* - 0.3.12	0.3.13

Around September 29, 2010, people started reporting that their sent transactions would not confirm. This happened because people modified Bitcoin to send sub-0.01 transactions without any fees. A 0.01 fee was at that time required by the network for such transactions (essentially prohibiting them), so the transactions remained at 0 confirmations forever. This became a more serious issue because Bitcoin would send transactions using bitcoins gotten from transactions with 0 confirmations, and these resulting transactions would also never confirm. Because Bitcoin tends to prefer sending smaller coins, these invalid transactions quickly multiplied, contaminating the wallets of everyone who received them.

Bitcoin was changed to only select coins with at least 1 confirmation. The remaining sub-0.01 transactions were cleared by generators who modified their version of Bitcoin to not require the micropayment fee. It took a while for everything to get cleared, though, because many of the intermediate transactions had been forgotten by the network by this point and had to be rebroadcast by the original senders.

References

• Initial reports
• US-CERT/NIST

CVE-2011-4447

Date: 2011-11-11
Summary: Wallet non-encryption
Fix Deployment: 98%

Affected		Fix
bitcoind wxBitcoin	0.4.0 - 0.4.1rc6	0.4.1 0.5.0

References

• Announcement
• Finding
• 0.5.0
• US-CERT/NIST

CVE-2012-1909

Date: 2012-03-07
Summary: Transaction overwriting
Fix Deployment: 92%

Affected		Fix
Bitcoin protocol	Before March 15th, 2012	BIP 30
Bitcoin-Qt bitcoind	* - 0.4.4rc2 0.5.0rc1 - 0.5.0.4rc2 0.5.1rc1 - 0.5.3rc2 0.6.0rc1 - 0.6.0rc2	0.4.4 0.5.0.4 0.5.3 0.6.0rc3
wxBitcoin	ALL	NONE

References

• Announcement
• Fix
• Gentoo bug tracker
• US-CERT/NIST

CVE-2012-1910

Date: 2012-03-17
Summary: MingW non-multithreading
Fix Deployment: 99%

Affected		Fix
Bitcoin-Qt for Windows	0.5.0rc1 - 0.5.0.4 0.5.1rc1 - 0.5.3.0 0.6.0rc1 - 0.6.0rc3	0.5.0.5 0.5.3.1 0.5.4 0.6.0rc4

References

• Announcement
• US-CERT/NIST

BIP-0016

Date: 2012-04-01
Summary: Mandatory P2SH protocol update
Deployment: 92%

Affected		Fix
Bitcoin-Qt bitcoind	* - 0.4.4 0.5.0rc1 - 0.5.0.5 0.5.1rc1 - 0.5.3 0.6.0rc1	0.4.5 0.5.0.6 0.5.4rc1 0.6.0rc2
wxBitcoin	ALL	NONE

References

• BIP 0016

CVE-2012-2459

Date: 2012-05-14
Summary: Block hash collision (via merkle tree)
Fix Deployment: 92%

Affected		Fix
Bitcoin-Qt bitcoind	* - 0.4.6rc1 0.5.0rc1 - 0.5.5rc1 0.6.0rc1 - 0.6.0.7rc1 0.6.1rc1 - 0.6.1rc1	0.4.6 0.5.5 0.6.0.7 0.6.1rc2

Block hash collisions can easily be made by duplicating transactions in the merkle tree. Such a collision is invalid, but if recorded (as Bitcoin-Qt and bitcoind prior to 0.6.1 did) would prevent acceptance of the legitimate block with the same hash. This could be used to fork the blockchain, including deep double-spend attacks.

References

• Announcement
• Gentoo bug tracker
• US-CERT/NIST
• Full Disclosure

CVE-2012-3789

Date: 2012-06-20
Summary: (Lack of) orphan txn resource limits
Fix Deployment: 83%

Affected		Fix
Bitcoin-Qt bitcoind	* - 0.4.7rc2 0.5.0rc1 - 0.5.6rc2 0.6.0rc1 - 0.6.0.8rc2 0.6.1rc1 - 0.6.2.2	0.4.7rc3 0.5.6rc3 0.6.0.9rc1 0.6.3rc1

References

• CVE-2012-3789
• 0.6.3rc1 Announcement
• US-CERT/NIST

BIP-0034

Date: Future
Summary: Mandatory block protocol update
Deployment: 66%

Affected		Fix
Bitcoin-Qt bitcoind	* - 0.4.7 0.5.0rc1 - 0.5.7 0.6.0rc1 - 0.6.0.9 0.6.1rc1 - 0.6.3	0.4.8rc1 0.5.7rc1 0.6.0.10rc1 0.6.4rc1 0.7.0rc1
wxBitcoin	ALL	NONE

References

• BIP 0034

Definitions

A critical vulnerability is one that will have disastrous consequences if it is exploited. A serious vulnerability is one that will have serious consequences if it is exploited.

See Also

• Changelog