Researchers say they discovered consensus level attack on Ethereum #TOGRP7

A research paper published by The Hebrew University in Israel reports having discovered the “first evidence of a consensus-level attack on a major cryptocurrency.” The paper is currently awaiting peer review but utilizes publicly available on-chain data and Ethereum’s open source codebase to affirm its conclusions.

At its core, the paper highlights an issue where miners can change the timestamp related to a mined block to avoid increased difficulty on the network. On-chain data appears to support the claim as Aviv Yaish, one of the paper’s authors, highlighted F2Pool’s block timestamps being artificially altered to improve rewards. Ethereum is maintained through a proof-of-work consensus mechanism, which will be moved to proof-of-stake this September.#togrp7