The Ethereum inscription protocol Ethscriptions was attacked, resulting in approximately 123 addresses losing about 202 Ethscriptions

ChainCatcher news, the creator of the Ethereum inscription protocol Ethscriptions, Middlemarch, tweeted that Ethscriptions has encountered an attack, resulting in approximately 123 addresses losing about 202 Ethscriptions due to this vulnerability. The vulnerability is not in the Ethscriptions protocol itself, but in a specific smart contract, and the protocol itself as well as other applications running on it were not affected.

Middlemarch stated that the reason for the vulnerability is that the contract cannot access the state of Ethscriptions, meaning the contract itself cannot know who owns a particular Ethscription, and users may end up paying for a non-existent Ethscription. The most direct way to avoid such exploitation is to require a trusted third party to confirm which deposits are valid. However, in this case, the person holding the private key that can confirm which deposits are valid is a single point of failure. The team plans to write a reference implementation to allow the protocol itself to perform the confirmation.