Ethereum developers have identified a vulnerability in the EIP-1559 protocol that could lead to network congestion. This was announced by Tim Beiko, a member of the Ethereum Foundation.
We started with a lot of action as @mhswende identified an issue in EIP-1559 yesterday where the new fields introduced in transactions (maxFee & maxPriorityFee) did not have an explicit cap. This meant that an attacker could create arbitrarily large transactions.
— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth ?? (@TimBeiko) May 28, 2021
The EIP-1559, presented in 2018, involves the burning of some of the transaction fees and helps to reduce the volatility of the gas price. The protocol also allows users to “tip” miners to speed up the transaction confirmations.
Developer Martin Holst Svende found that EIP-1559 does not set a maximum limit for such payments. This would allow an attacker to enter an absurdly large number to overload the network, even if he does not pay gas fees.
Tim Beiko said:
Because the fields in 1559 are maximums, you could abuse this, not actually pay those huge gas values, and spam the network.
He further Tweeted:
Luckily, the fix for this is quite simple, as suggested by Martin here: https://t.co/x3W62DVcsi pic.twitter.com/OhNS6tLqQH
— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth ?? (@TimBeiko) May 28, 2021
The controversial EIP-1559 received support from developers and users, but divided miners into two camps.
Opponents of the proposal, including the SparkPool and Ethermine pools that jointly control 44.8% of the network hashrate, wanted to concentrate more than 51% of the computing power in the latter. However, their attempt failed.
EIP-1559 will be part of the London hard fork scheduled for July 2021.