Bitcoin Core developers fix 5-year-old disk fill vulnerability

PANews reported on July 21 that according to Protos, the Bitcoin Core development team this month fixed a disk filling vulnerability that has plagued full node operators for five years. The vulnerability allows attackers to force node hard disks to continuously write redundant data through malicious log instructions (such as LogPrintf, LogInfo, LogWarning, or LogError, etc.), causing serious impacts on mechanical hard disk nodes and even causing performance degradation of flash memory devices.

The fix was submitted via PR 32604 and merged into the main branch by senior developer Gloria Zhao. The submission passed 19 checks and no objections. Developers expect that the disk filling attack will disappear completely after the patch is popularized in the Bitcoin network with the new version of Bitcoin Core. The latest version of Bitcoin Core is 29.0, which was released on April 14, and the Core version is usually upgraded every few months. As a voluntary software package that does not allow automatic updates, full node operators must always choose to manually upgrade their software. About 16% of node operators are running version 29.0. Other nodes are running older versions of the software.