The vulnerability found in the Babylon staking code may slow down block generation speed

According to a report by Cointelegraph, developers stated in a post released on GitHub on Thursday that a newly disclosed software vulnerability in the Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon could allow malicious validators to disrupt part of the network's consensus process, potentially slowing down block generation during critical periods.

The vulnerability affects Babylon's block signing scheme, specifically the BLS voting extension scheme, which is used to prove that validators have reached consensus on a particular block. The flaw allows malicious validators to deliberately omit the block hash field when sending the voting extension, which could lead to consensus issues among validators during network epoch boundaries. The block hash field is used to inform validators which blocks they are actually voting to support in the consensus process, and this vulnerability allows for its omission.

Through this vulnerability, in theory, malicious validators could cause other validators to crash during critical consensus checks at phase boundaries. If multiple validators are affected, it would result in a slowdown of block generation. There have been no reports of this vulnerability being actively exploited, but developers warn that if left unaddressed, it could be abused.