A vulnerability in Bitmain's S15 ASICs was revealed.

[Paha87]

Developed by James Hilliard, best known for its proposal to improve a suggestion for improvement to the bitcoin 91 (BIP, which activated SegWit and prevented SegWit2x) and the program CGMiner, found a vulnerability in the firmware Bitmain Antminer S15.

This vulnerability was then turned into an exploit by an anonymous security researcher. Hilliard publicly demonstrated the exploit in action on his Twitter account.

The exploit allows the attacker to do almost everything, including changing the address of payments of the exploited miner. The previous vulnerability, called "Antbleed", allowed any Antminer to be remotely disabled, posing a significant risk to the bitcoin network, which is heavily dependent on Bitmain hardware.

Open source is better

Hilliard and anonymous 00whiterabbit have offered to reveal the details of this vulnerability and help fix it, but there is one catch: Bitmain must stop its continual violation of the GNU General Public License agreement. The GPL requires that derivatives of GPL code be "free" - users must have access to the code to use, modify, and create their own derivatives of it.

Hilliard's request is not random in any sense. The code for CGMiner is part of what makes up the Antminer S15 firmware. If Bitmain cannot release the source code for its firmware, Hilliard and 00whiterabbit will respond. They will release the exploit.

However, running an exploit on Bitmain miners will not be trivial. An attacker must have network access to open the ASIC Antminer shell.

Worse than Antbleed

The Antbleed vulnerability was quite serious. But this new attack, called "antsploit", could create much more chaos for users of Bitmain devices. Almost everything imaginable is possible, from switching the pool on which you are mining, to changing the payment address. The vulnerability is at the basic hardware level of Bitmain, which means that there is little you can do about it at the moment.

Exploits are one of the main arguments in favor of open source software. There is no code that would not be useful for a public review of those people who could crack it. Especially when users have an incentive to show results as in programs with errors, companies get much more than they "lose".

Hilliard suggested that Bitmain is probably closed source, so users are not able to disperse their equipment and increase maintenance costs. Specialist approves:

Bitmain doesn't seem to care about enforcing copyright law. Unfortunately, closed-source firmware is not very useful in the bitcoin network, as it can hide things like Antbleed. This is the risk of centralization.


One constant complaint against the GNU GPL is the lack of actual enforcement. Companies have repeatedly violated the rules with virtually no consequences.

Link (Russian) - https://altstake.io/news/vskrylasyuyazvimosty-v-asikah-s15ot-bitmain