SushiSwap swerves US$350mln exploit as white-hat hacker finds auction bug

The cryptocurrency SushiSwap (SUSHI) was down around 5% on Wednesday as it reportedly escaped a costly tech vulnerability.

A cybersecurity researcher who works for venture capital firm Paradigm identified a flaw in an auction smart-contract that, according to Cointelegraph, could have been exploited to the tune of US$350mln (or 109,000 Ethereum ETH tokens)

SushiSwap’s MISO platform was used to launch the sale of the BitDAO token in which the problem code was found.

In a blog post, the researcher explained that the flawed code could allow a hacker to repeatedly reuse the same Eth token to effectively bid in the auction process for free. To make matters worse, a hacker would then be able to trigger refunds to receive new Eth tokens from the platform.

The researcher, a so-called ‘white hat’ hacker, subsequently informed SushiSwap which deployed a ‘rescue’ to prevent the potential exploit being found “in the wild”.

BitDAO ended the auction manually and SushiSwap determined that no funds were lost.

In the end, BitDAO raised some 112,000 Eth which are worth around US$336mln.

Priced at US$12.98 the SUSHI price was down 5.9% on Monday, in a broadly negative trading day for cryptos.

Story by ProactiveInvestors