On February 3rd, we received several reports that an attacker can send a specially-crafted RPC request to a public Parity Ethereum node (any version pre 2.2.9-stable and pre 2.3.2-beta) and that node will crash.

Who’s affected?

Affected Parity Ethereum nodes are those that serve JSONRPC as a public service.

Who’s not directly affected?

Parity Ethereum nodes who don’t serve JSONRPC to third parties on the internet—i.e., most nodes—should not be directly affected. The default mode is to not serve JSONRPC publicly.

Fix available—update ASAP

Releases 2.2.9-stable and 2.3.2-beta are now available and fix this issue. Download them here.

Please update your nodes to the newest version ASAP, especially if you’re running a publicly-facing JSONRPC endpoints. Nodes with `--auto-update=all` flag set will receive the updates automatically.

Bug bounty program

Thanks to Kosala Hemachandra from MyEtherWallet for being the first to bring this to our attention. As always, we welcome and reward bug findings as per our bug bounty program.