A vulnerability discovered in the Babylon staking code may slow down block generation.

PANews reported on January 9th that, according to Cointelegraph, developers stated in a post on GitHub on Thursday that a newly disclosed software vulnerability in the Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon could allow malicious validators to disrupt parts of the network's consensus process, potentially slowing down block generation at critical times. This vulnerability affects Babylon's block signature scheme, the BLS voting extension scheme, which is used to prove that validators have reached an agreement on a block.

This vulnerability allows malicious validators to intentionally omit the block hash field when sending vote extensions, potentially leading to validator consensus issues during network epoch boundaries. The block hash field informs validators which blocks they are actually voting for during the consensus process, and this vulnerability allows this field to be omitted. Theoretically, through this vulnerability, a malicious validator could crash other validators during critical consensus checks at epoch boundaries, causing a slowdown in block generation if multiple validators are affected. There are currently no descriptions of this vulnerability being actively exploited, but developers warn that it could be abused if left unaddressed.