Wormhole Hack - It May Not Be a Bad Thing

Wormhole got hacked and lost $321 million in the recent hacking incident. Wormhole is a cross-chain message-passing protocol that connects Solana, Ethereum, Terra, and Binance Smart Chain.

TL;DR

Wormhole got hacked. Solana got its first hacking incident. It is an opportunity for Solana to improve its security.

Hacking

The hacker was able to mint 120K Wormhole-wrapped Ether on Solana. They then bridged 93,750 of these tokens to Ethereum and withdrew the unwrapped Ether. 

Vulnerability

The signature verification is a vulnerable point to let attackers insert commends and false messages so that they can bypass Wormhole’s verify_signatures function to fool the code and successfully withdraw Ethers from the network.

Solana Security Hole

Solana has a security vulnerability that needs to be fixed. It helps the blockchain to improve but at the same time makes Solana worth hacking.

Cross-Chain Vulnerability

Running cross-chain is always a risky business. It tests all cross-chain platform security and its own security. Hackers love to challenge such platforms and to find a loophole to take massive funds away.

In Conclusion

Hacking will never stop until the blockchain has improved to become unhackable.