US Department of Commerce has recognized bitcoin NFTs as cyber threat

Experts referred to the statements of the Bitcoin Core client developer and included the vulnerability in the national registry

11.12.2023 - 12:48

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What’s new? The US government recognized bitcoin NFTs as a cybersecurity threat. Thus, the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) included an entry that the ability to run the Ordinals protocol is the result of a flaw in the Bitcoin blockchain. Experts of the service referred to the statement of the developer of the Bitcoin Core client Luke Dashjr, who reported that Ordinals allows one to bypass the limits set by users on the amount of additional data in transactions, disguising them as program code.

Entry in the NVD database

What else is known? Being added to the NVD’s list means that the vulnerability has been recognized and cataloged, and has been deemed to be of public concern. NVD is managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) within the US Department of Commerce.

According to Dashjr, the bug was fixed in the Bitcoin Knots v25.1 client, but it remains in the upcoming 26th version of the Bitcoin Core client and may not potentially be fixed until the 27th version, which will be released in 2024. In that case, the release of new bitcoin NFTs will not be possible.

Dashjr has repeatedly called for such assets to be banned because they overload the network with spam. According to the mempool as of December 11, 12:30 UTC, there are more than 200 000 bitcoin transactions in the queue for processing.

For his part, Yu Xiang, founder of blockchain audit firm SlowMist, opposed the elimination of bitcoin NFTs because they increase network activity.

Bitcoin Core developer calls the possibility of issuing bitcoin-NFT consequence of network vulnerability

According to Luke Dashjr, the bug may be fixed in the 27th version of the client, which is expected to be released next year

The Ordinals protocol allows additional data in text or image format to be attached to tiny fractional parts of bitcoin (satoshis), which then become an integral part of the blockchain.

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