Jump Crypto Flags Critical Vulnerability on BNB Chain

A flaw in the BNB Beacon Chain has been discovered by Jump Crypto, a leader in the creation and investment of web3 infrastructure globally, which could have resulted in a big loss.

Jump Crypto published a report about the vulnerability discovered two days prior in a blog post on February 10 stating it could have “led to a large loss of funds.” A fraudulent transfer made possible by the flaw would allow an attacker to acquire nearly limitless amounts of BNB tokens, which would result in destination accounts receiving many more BNB tokens than the sender originally sent. 

Jump Crypto states that the “bugs that allow infinite minting of native assets are some of the most critical vulnerabilities in Web3. As such, this finding is proof that we all must stay vigilant and collaborate to elevate security assurances across all projects. “

Possible Exploit Prevented by Jump Crypto

The BNB team was privately informed of the problem, which enabled the rapid deployment of a solution. The BNB team was able to resolve the problem using overflow-resistant arithmetic techniques for the SDK coin type. 

Notably, BNB Chain is Binance’s original blockchain. Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of the business, tweeted his appreciation towards the Jump Crypto team for finding the bug.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible Smart Chain, based on a fork of go-ethereum, and the Beacon Chain, constructed on top of Tendermint and Cosmos SDK, make up the BNB Chain, according to the article. 

But the Beacon Chain makes use of a fork of BNB that is hosted on GitHub and has various BNB-specific modifications. Jump Crypto, which just launched a massive research effort devoted to finding and repairing vulnerabilities across platforms through coordinated disclosure, emphasizes that “it deviates from the Cosmos SDK upstream in several ways, motivating us to take extra care in reviewing the differences.”

An earlier brief shutdown of the BNB Chain due to a cross-chain bridge exploit was reported in October to have cost between $100 million and $110 million in bitcoins.