Babylon протокол залога биткоинов выявил критическую уязвимость: злоумышленный валидатор может замедлить создание блоков

【BitTui】Bitcoin staking ecosystem faces technical risks again. The development team recently disclosed a critical software vulnerability in the Babylon protocol on GitHub — this flaw is hidden in the BLS voting extension scheme, which was originally designed to ensure validators reach consensus on blocks.

The key issue lies in the block signature mechanism. Validators need to attach a block hash field when voting to indicate which blocks they support. However, this vulnerability allows malicious nodes to directly skip this field when sending voting extensions. It may seem insignificant, but the consequences are problematic — when this occurs during critical consensus checks at epoch boundaries, other validators may crash due to incomplete information.

Imagine if multiple validators are triggered by this issue simultaneously, the block generation speed of the entire network will slow down noticeably. This is not a hypothetical threat — developers explicitly pointed out that although there have been no reports of active exploitation yet, if not patched in time, malicious exploitation is only a matter of time.

For Babylon and the Bitcoin staking ecosystem, this is a timely wake-up call. The security of staking protocols directly affects validators’ returns and the stability of the entire network. Any flaw at the consensus layer could evolve into systemic risk.