Zcash Founder Zooko Reveals Orchard Severe Forgery Vulnerability Details

BlockBeats News, June 5th - Zcash founder Zooko announced that on May 29th, security researcher Taylor Hornby discovered a critical counterfeiting vulnerability in the Zcash Orchard pool. Taylor disclosed the vulnerability to the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), which then coordinated an emergency response with the ecosystem. The fix was completed on June 2nd.

Shielded Labs stated that the vulnerability was real and exploitable. Taylor's exploit code, developed in a local testing environment, could generate unlimited and undetectable counterfeit ZEC. Due to Orchard's privacy features, it is not possible to cryptographically prove whether the vulnerability was exploited before the fix. However, Shielded Labs believes the likelihood of prior exploitation is low. Shielded Labs is exploring a network upgrade proposal to deploy a new shielded pool and perform turnstile accounting on all tokens from the Orchard pool. This process would allow anyone to verify the integrity of the Zcash supply and prove the absence of counterfeit ZEC in the Orchard pool.