Ethereum Software Parity to Update After Critical Bug Detected

Revealed last night by UK-based Parity Technologies in a blog post, the issue was found to cause those running the software to fall out of sync, meaning others using different software would not recognize their transactions.

Parity is now urging all users to update their software to a newly patched version.

Publicly available data suggests the bug could have impacted roughly 30 percent of the ethereum network - those that use software issued by Parity to stay in sync with the wider network.

According to representatives of Parity, the issue was patched before it reached nodes operating the live ethereum blockchain.

As companies that operate on ethereum begin updating their software to avoid the issue, it has been theorized that it could still impact any blockchains that run Parity software, including users of ethereum classic.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Wei Tang, a Parity developer who assisted with yesterday's code patch, said that the bug is linked to a piece of code from ethereum improvement proposal 86.

The full ethereum upgrade to EIP 86 was postponed due to its complexity Wei explained that Parity nevertheless implemented the code, possibly due to its role in ethereum's upcoming consensus switch.

According to Wei, the team in charge of implementing it within Parity's software had overlooked three lines of code that led to yesterday's consensus issue.

Several such transactions were discovered on the Ropsten test network yesterday, and due to the transactions incompatibility with the wider ethereum blockchain, the transactions led a fork to occur between Parity and Geth clients.

Speaking in a press release, Kirill Pimenov, head of security at Parity, said that in the "Worst case" such transactions would have resulted in corrupted blocks on the ethereum mainnet that "Would still be treated as valid by other affected Parity ethereum nodes."