During its launch, Ethereum set itself the goal of becoming the leading altcoin in the cryptocurrency industry. Since then, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency has faced both its network as well as its price difficulties.
The Ethereum Foundation decided to launch Ethereum 2.0 to ensure the network can be scaled to fit use cases. Multiple setbacks have threatened the new version but it finally looks like things were looking up.
Just recently, the Least Authority stated that the phase0 audit of the Ethereum 2.0 specifications had been completed. Ethereum 2.0 claims to be a significant upgrade to the current network. The upgrade will take place in three segments, phase 0 taking care of the Beacon Chain, while phase 1 focuses on the shard chains. Phase 2 will take care of executive environments where Ethereum is actually going to be tested.
According to Least Authority:
” It is one of the first Proof of Stake (PoS) / sharded protocol projects planned for production. As a result, there has been minimal opportunity to study the impacts of design decisions on real-world uses of such blockchain implementations, and none on the same scale. The long term stability of PoS blockchains is an area of active research that will need to be monitored over time as they are used in production.”
The audit was conducted by Dylan Lott and Hind Kurhan to ensure that Ethereum 2.0 runs properly across all applications. Since no other large-scale implementations of a Proof of Stake (PoS) system currently exist in the industry, auditing Ethereum 2.0 was an entirely new task. The team revealed that the Ethereum 2.0 specifications were “well thought out and comprehensive”
Network analysis highlighted the strong emphasis on protection across the board, as the cryptocurrency industry was vulnerable to numerous attacks. Although most aspects of the network were efficient, some areas were also found to be lacking. The team identified seven issues and suggested three best practices that could be adopted by Ethereum 2.0.
The two major areas that deserved further review was the Peer-to-peer networking layer and the ENR system. Both were chosen because laying the foundation of a strong network layer was paramount during Phase 0. One part of the network that had issues was the block proposer system.
Least Authority identified two different issues with the block proposer system during the audit. There was an information leak within the system that was later patched up. Since it was fixed, the block proposer system remains protected without additional computational energy.
The second problem was noticed in the Peer-to-peer networking system with the audit team reiterating that a deeper analysis needs to be conducted later. Developers noticed attack vectors through the P2P messaging systems that would come under scrutiny later on.