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Truebit Hack Lets Attacker Mint $26 Million in Tokens for Free

Key Takeaways

  • A code flaw in Truebit’s smart contract let an attacker mint $26 million in tokens almost for free;
  • The issue came from missing overflow protection in an arithmetic operation within the Purchase contract;
  • Solidity version 0.6.10 lacked automatic overflow checks, causing calculations to reset near zero.

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Truebit Hack Lets Attacker Mint $26 Million in Tokens for Free

A vulnerability in Truebit’s code enabled an attack that generated about $26 million in new tokens.

The flaw allowed the attacker to create tokens almost for free, which shows that even long-running blockchain systems can still be at risk.

According to a report from the blockchain security firm SlowMist, the issue was linked to how Truebit’s smart contract handled payments. The attacker exploited a contract error that allowed them to generate large amounts of tokens “without paying any ETH ETH $3,215.56 ".

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SlowMist explained that a small arithmetic error caused the problem. The report stated, "Due to a lack of overflow protection in an integer addition operation, the Purchase contract of Truebit Protocol produced an incorrect result when calculating the amount of ETH required to mint TRU tokens".

That error enabled the attacker to mint $26 million worth of TRU tokens with almost no cost. The post-mortem noted that the smart contract’s code “erroneously reduced” the price calculation.

The issue was linked to the version of Solidity used to write the contract, version 0.6.10. Earlier versions of the programming language lacked automatic checks to prevent numerical overflow.

When a number went beyond the maximum value for “uint256", it would loop back to a small number near zero.

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Aaron S. Editor-In-Chief
Having completed a Master’s degree in Economics, Politics, and Cultures of the East Asia region, Aaron has written scientific papers analyzing the differences between Western and Collective forms of capitalism in the post-World War II era.
With close to a decade of experience in the FinTech industry, Aaron understands all of the biggest issues and struggles that crypto enthusiasts face. He’s a passionate analyst who is concerned with data-driven and fact-based content, as well as that which speaks to both Web3 natives and industry newcomers.
Aaron is the go-to person for everything and anything related to digital currencies. With a huge passion for blockchain & Web3 education, Aaron strives to transform the space as we know it, and make it more approachable to complete beginners.
Aaron has been quoted by multiple established outlets, and is a published author himself. Even during his free time, he enjoys researching the market trends, and looking for the next supernova.

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