Babylon Bitcoin Staking Protocol Reveals Critical Vulnerability: Malicious Validators May Slow Down Block Generation

【BitPush】The Bitcoin staking ecosystem faces renewed technical risks. The development team recently disclosed a serious software vulnerability in the Babylon protocol on GitHub—this flaw is hidden within the BLS voting extension scheme, which was originally designed to ensure consensus among validators on blocks.

The core issue lies in the block signature mechanism. Validators need to include the block hash field when voting to specify which blocks they support. However, this vulnerability allows malicious nodes to skip this field when sending vote extensions. It might sound minor, but the consequences are serious—when this occurs during critical consensus checks at epoch boundaries, other validators may crash due to incomplete information.

Imagine if multiple validators trigger this issue simultaneously, the entire network’s block production speed could slow significantly. This is not a virtual threat—developers explicitly state that although no active exploitation has been observed so far, it’s only a matter of time before malicious actors take advantage if not patched promptly.

For Babylon and the Bitcoin staking ecosystem, this serves as a timely warning. The security of staking protocols directly impacts validator rewards and the overall network stability. Any consensus-layer vulnerability could evolve into systemic risk.