The Gas Siphon Attack: How it Happened and How to Protect Yourself by Shane Fontaine (Devcon5)
Channel: Ethereum Foundation
Date: 2019-12-27

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/5/the-gas-siphon-attack-how-it-happened-and-how-to-protect-yourself

The Gas Siphon Attack allows anyone to siphon value from many exchanges in the form of gas refunds, a mechanism built directly into the Ethereum protocol. Users can write a simple script that continuously drains unprotected exchange hot wallets of all of their ETH. Until this was responsibly disclosed, many exchanges were affected with varying degrees of severity.
How it happened, who was affected, and the technical details behind the attack are discussed during the presentation. The talk dives into the details of the refund mechanism built into the Ethereum network, and how it can be maliciously abused. The presentation explains who is vulnerable and what they can do about it.
Finally, the talk covers different ways to protect yourself and your dapp from both known and unknown exploits. Preventative measures are presented that will allow for protection from these types of attacks.

Speaker(s): Shane Fontaine
Skill level: advanced
Track: Security
Keywords: technical

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 5 was held in Osaka, Japan on Oct 8 - 11, 2019.
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