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--- | ||
title: Blocks from the future | ||
slug: 2024-09-07-incident | ||
authors: kevinhammond | ||
tags: [security,consensus] | ||
hide_table_of_contents: false | ||
--- | ||
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## Blocks from the future | ||
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We identified two issues relating to "blocks from the future". | ||
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1. Blocks from the near future | ||
2. Blocks from the far future | ||
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While blocks from the near future have been known to occur on mainnet as a result of clock skew/misconfiguration, | ||
there are no known instances on mainnet of blocks from the far future. In both cases, restarting an affected | ||
node would resolve the issue. | ||
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### What is meant by a Block from the Future? | ||
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A node considers a block to be from the future if its slot is ahead of | ||
the current slot. Ouroboros Praos mandates that all chains containing | ||
blocks from the future (at that time) are ignored during chain | ||
selection. As Praos assumes that all nodes have access to perfectly | ||
synchronized clocks, this will never cause nodes to disregard blocks | ||
that have been minted by other honest nodes. In an actual real-world | ||
deployment, this assumption is unrealistic due to the imperfections of | ||
protocols like NTP as well as leap seconds. | ||
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The issues that were identified meant that blocks from the future could potentially be | ||
used by malicious actors to create denial-of-service attacks. | ||
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Both issues were fixed by Cardano node 8.8 or later, and were eradicated at the Chang hard fork. | ||
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### Further Details | ||
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[Report on Blocks from the Near Future](https://) | ||
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[Report on Blocks from the Far Future](https://) |
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