What is a "cryptographic vulnerability or weakness in the Bitcoin protocol"?

[raybucks]

Were there any cryptographic vulnerabilities or weaknesses in the Bitcoin protocol at any time during its development or subsequent updates?

How were these vulnerabilities addressed or mitigated in a way that ensures the long-term safety and security of the network?

Were there any lesser known, non-public security issues that were successfully resolved?

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[Bitco55]

Well OP,  no cryptographic algorithm or protocol is perfect, which means that, Yes, bitcoin has definitely been victim to many vulnerable protocol errors.

One of the many would be the 2010 Overflow bug. This happened in August 2010, when an attacker created a transaction that generated 184 billion bitcoins and sent it to two accounts, meanwhile, there are only 21 million bitcoins available.

This was quickly noticed and addressed by Bitcoin developers, and the invalid block that contained the transaction was replaced by a valid one in a fork of the blockchain.

Another would be the transaction malleability issues in February 2014, the 51k attack, and the quantum computing threat  ( the last 2 may not have happened yet, but they are possible future risks ).

3. As for a lesser known attack, there are the ikes of eclipse attack, CVE-2018-17144, INVDoS.

   Can't remember the story behind the first two but for INVDoS, it was a denial of service attack that could and would have crashed Bitcoin nodes by sending the malformed transactions. The bug/ error was discovered in 2018 by a bitcoin protocol engineer, Brydon Filler but he kept it a secret for 2 years and disclosed it in 2020 after it was fixed by a software update.

My not have any links for you, but you can read a whole lot more on the internet, maybe check out places like forbes.com, or even on the forum here...

[Upgrade00]

One of the many would be the 2010 Overflow bug. This happened in August 2010, when an attacker created a transaction that generated 184 billion bitcoins and sent it to two accounts, meanwhile, there are only 21 million bitcoins available.

This first came to my mind when I read the op. I know I had read of it somewhere many years ago, but did not remember the exact details of it, not nearly enough to allow me search for what happens.
Here's a link I found on it with the info you provided.

Another would be the transaction malleability issues in February 2014, the 51k attack, and the quantum computing threat

As much as I know, the transaction malleability issue was MT Gox looking for a way to escape culpability for the bitcoins stolen from their wallet.
The other two are not vulnerabilities at all, so should not be mentioned here to avoid misinterpretation.

[hugeblack]

The most recorded vulnerability was CVE-2010-5139 aka block 74638^[1], which contained two overflow outputs transaction each 92233720368.54277039 BTC (64 bit signed number) the most important is sign bit when it is 0 it is positive or 1 then the number is negative (It cannot be negative because that mean input is greater than the output.) In addition to problems with transaction fees. A hard fork was performed to solve this problem.

In general, whenever there is such vulnerability, the possibility of a hard division can solve any problem.


BTW BITCOIN up time is 99.988576912 7 % and 100% since 2014 ----> https://bitcoinuptime.org/

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822.0

[raybucks]

BTW BITCOIN up time is 99.988576912 7 % and 100% since 2014 ----> https://bitcoinuptime.org/

I like the site you shared.

Numerous vulnerabilities may exist, some of which remain undisclosed. Instead of immediately revealing these vulnerabilities to the public, responsible researchers choose to confidentially report their discoveries to the Bitcoin Core development team. This approach is taken to prevent malicious individuals from taking advantage of the vulnerability before a solution can be implemented.

[JunaidAzizi]

Were there any lesser known, non-public security issues that were successfully resolved?

The Bitcoin network is very vast and there is an error coming in this network from time to time the Bitcoin developers team going to fix it now the Bitcoin is secure and safe and you can trust Bitcoin now easily. In some years a vulnerability arose in which the attacker changed the transaction  ID of the Bitcoin transaction and the rest of the thing remained the same and when they found they resolved it.

In 2012 security researchers found vulnerabilities in the Bitcoin wallet software and the attacker could easily steal someone's funds through that but later on it was also resolved. After that, the Bitcoin developer team announces a reward to those who find any vulnerabilities in the Bitcoin code.

[Sayeds56]

Were there any cryptographic vulnerabilities or weaknesses in the Bitcoin protocol at any time during its development or subsequent updates?

How were these vulnerabilities addressed or mitigated in a way that ensures the long-term safety and security of the network?

Were there any lesser known, non-public security issues that were successfully resolved?

Cryptography is a security method to protect transactions from potential hacking threats by using a code that helps to keep the data safe. In simple words it is like putting a lock on your box. There were vulnerabilities and weaknesses in early days of Bitcoin, and those were successfully addressed by its development and updates. There has not been any reported incident of hacking in Bitcoin network during the recent history, that reaffirms reliability of Bitcoin security system.

[WatChe]

Bitcoin is very much secure till date because its based on security protocols like ECDSA digital signatures, SHA256 and more. The security of Bitcoin lies in these security protocols. As long as these security protocols are not breached we can say Bitcoin is completely safe.
There is some threat to Bitcoin from quantum computing that is still in its early stage but will be rolled out in next 10 to 15 years. Quantum computing has claimed to solve the unsolved problems of current security protocols. 

[digaran]

Numerous vulnerabilities may exist, some of which remain undisclosed. Instead of immediately revealing these vulnerabilities to the public, responsible researchers choose to confidentially report their discoveries to the Bitcoin Core development team. This approach is taken to prevent malicious individuals from taking advantage of the vulnerability before a solution can be implemented.

What if you can't trust anyone not even developers? Should you keep it to yourself and wait until someone else finds it? What if by then it'd be too late and damage has been done?

Now who would benefit the most if Bitcoin stays safe? Satoshi of course, the biggest whale of crypto, now who can be the most trusted person to share any possible vulnerability / weakness with? Of course the one and only @Satoshi but how does one do that? Of course the same way I did.

Lets just hope he is not arrogant to think he knows everything and there could be things unknown to him.😉

[Faisal2202]

Were there any cryptographic vulnerabilities or weaknesses in the Bitcoin protocol at any time during its development or subsequent updates?

How were these vulnerabilities addressed or mitigated in a way that ensures the long-term safety and security of the network?

Were there any lesser known, non-public security issues that were successfully resolved?

You have asked a good question, which never came to my mind before when I was newbie, I don't know why I did not think about it but recently I came to found out that there were such weaknesses in the Bitcoin blockchain and that incident is known as value overflow incident. In which some miner used some code to make 184,467,440,737.09551616 BTC which even exceeds the number of totally supply of BTC. And after detecting this issue, It was solved. Thanks to pooya87 for bringing this useful information in front of us.

Well, this error was solved by the developers easily and till now, we have not seen anything like that. For confirmation --> Strange block 74638

[Medusah]

The most important vulnerability was exposed in August 2010:  https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident.

It was fixed within hours:  https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/d4c6b90ca3f9b47adb1b2724a0c3514f80635c84#diff-118fcbaaba162ba17933c7893247df3aR1013

Code:

 // Check for negative or overflow input values
            if (txPrev.vout[prevout.n].nValue < 0)
                return error("ConnectInputs() : txin.nValue negative");
            if (txPrev.vout[prevout.n].nValue > MAX_MONEY)
                return error("ConnectInputs() : txin.nValue too high");
            if (nValueIn > MAX_MONEY)
                return error("ConnectInputs() : txin total too high");

"Software without bugs is software with random features". 

[hatshepsut93]

In my book "cryptographic vulnerability" is the vulnerability of an algorithm itself and not its concrete implementations or software that uses it. Bitcoin has no such weaknesses as of now, because when everything is implemented correctly, the cryptography can't be broken.

But bad implementations lead to cryptographic attacks. One of such attacks can happen when the ECDSA algorithm is incorrectly implemented and it uses weakly random or static K parameter, which allows recovery of private key.