After bitcoin, digital currency ether is the second most widespread cryptocurrency. Ethereum – the blockchain platform - supports ether transactions. Last week Ehereum wanted to carry out one of its regular updates, but this was stopped at the last minute following an alert from the start-up ChainSecurity. The spin-off company founded by ETH Zurich scientists realised that the upgrade would open up a security loophole.
“If the upgrade had gone ahead as planned, malicious users could have attacked certain contracts and then been able to raid the accounts of other users,” explains Hubert Ritzdorf, Technical Director of ChainSecurity, in an ETH press release.
ChainSecurity is a spin-off founded one year ago by ETH Professor Martin Vechev and the former ETH post-graduate students Ritzdorf and Petar Tsankov. The company’s overall goal is to make blockchain technologies more secure. To that end, it develops and operates automated scanning programs for auditing smart contracts. Providers of smart contracts can ask ChainSecurity to audit them and thus guarantee the security of their contracts. According to ETH, ChainSecurity is "practically an inspection authority for smart contracts”.
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