National Vulnerability Base Adds Bitcoin Vulnerability to Its List
The National Vulnerability Base (NVD) of the USA introduced bitcoin to its list on December 9, paying attention to the vulnerability of the protocol, which allowed the development of the Ordinals Protocol in 2022. According to records in the database, in some versions of Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots, it is possible to circumvent the limit of the data volume, masking them as a code. “How was operated in the wild in scripts in 2022 and 2023,” the document says.
Adding to the NVD list means that a specific vulnerability was recognized, cataloged, and acknowledged as important for the public. The base is managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST), the agency of the US Department of Trade.
The vulnerability of the bitcoin network is currently being analyzed. One potential consequence may be a large amount of non-wrapping data being added to the blockchain, which can potentially increase the size of the network and negatively affect performance and transaction fees.
On the NVD website as an information resource, the recent post of developer Bitcoin Kor Luke Deshra in X (previously Twitter) is presented. Deshra claims that the incrimination uses the Bitcoin Core vulnerability for spam on the network.
Why is this important for the ordinals? The incrimination is to embed additional data into a specific Satoshi (the smallest unit of bitcoin). This data can be any digital objects, such as images, text, or other forms of media. Each time the data is added to Satoshi, they become a constant part of the bitcoin blockchain.
Although the data of data has been part of the Bitcoin protocol for some time, its popularity has only grown with the advent of ordinals at the end of 2022 – a protocol that allowed for the introduction of unique digital works of art directly in Bitcoin transactions, similar to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum network.
The volume of transactions of the ordinals overloaded the Bitcoin network several times in 2023, leading to increased competition for transaction confirmations, resulting in higher fees and slower processing.
If the vulnerability is eliminated, this could potentially limit the possibility of creating ordinal instruments