DAO - Reading Assignment

Ethereum Smart Contract Security Course
#1

Answer the questions below:

  1. What is DAO?
  2. What function had the vulnerability?
  3. Why was the hard fork initiated?
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#2
  1. Distributed autonomous organizations implemented via smart contracts which enforce the governance mechanisms of a DAO.
  2. The split function
  3. Running on the tight timeline of the DAO split function, the proposed soft fork was too buggy, leaving a hard fork as the last option: “By doing so, the funds would be returned, and regulators would be kept out.”
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#3
  1. What is DAO?
    Distributed autonomous organizations
  2. What function had the vulnerability?
    split function
  3. Why was the hard fork initiated?
    to return lost funds - ultimately as a side unfortunate consequence side step decentralisation
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#4
  1. Distributed Autonomous Organization, which has a decentralised governance through smart contracts.
  2. split function
  3. the hard fork was done to reverse the hack. A soft fork was considered but cancelled because of security flaws.
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#5
  1. What is DAO?

Decentralized
Autonomous
Organization

  1. What function had the vulnerability?

Child DAO creation.

  1. Why was the hard fork initiated?

Some community members have disagreed with the decesion of ethereum founders to refund the loss to the hack victims (as it kind of violates the immutability concept of the blockchain technology).

#6

  1. What is DAO?
    Decentralized/distributed autonomous organizations, governed by smart contracts

  2. What function had the vulnerability?
    ‘Split’ function, which allowed attacker to recursively call the function and withdraw money many times.
    Basically it allowed a way to retrieve the Ether first and update the balance late.
    Attacker managed to recursively call the split function and retrieved their funds multiple times before getting to the step where the code would check the balance.

  3. Why was the hard fork initiated?
    To retrieve stolen funds from DAO hack

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#7

What is DAO?
A virtual venture capital investment fund governed by the investors

What function had the vulnerability?
THe DAO Split function

Why was the hard fork initiated?
To rollback the hacker’s transaction and return the stolen funds.

#8

  1. DAO is an acronym for decentralized autonomous organization. It is a system of governance maintained by a series of smart contracts working in conjunction to reach an agreed upon goal. The DAO was a virtual venture capital fund relying on smart contracts to deploy its collected assets. Investors traded ETH for DAO tokens, pooled their funds together, and voted on investment proposals using their DAO tokens. If proposals passed a curator check and was approved by 20% of all collected DAO tokens, the smart contract representing the proposal received the investment funds.

  2. The split function, which any token holder could initiate at any time to retract their funds from the proposal agreed upon by the majority. However, the function was written to initiate the transfer first and updated the smart contract after the funds were withdrawn. Therefore, the split function could be called in rapid succession to retrieve the funds until it eventually failed and finally updated the balance.

  3. It was the only way to return the funds taken by the bad actor to the original investors, which the majority of the Ethereum community agreed was the proper course of action. A soft fork was the first alternative, but it would pose additional security flaws if carried out.

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#9
  1. A Decentralized Autonomous Organization. In this case The DAO, was a big trial of DAO on ethereum net that was hacked.
  2. The function to split into a child DAO
  3. Because the hack and the lack of consensus to other solutions. Tried to go with a softfork but discovered more issues in the way.
#10

What is DAO?
A DAO is another computer code through which a set of smart contracts are connected together and function as a governance mechanism.

What function had the vulnerability?
Once a split function is called, the code was written in a way to retrieve the Ether first and update the balance later. Additionally, it was not checking whether there was a recursive call, which is an expression used to indicate a function that calls himself.

Why was the hard fork initiated?
Doing nothing and soft fork were canceled by the community. The majority voted for hard fork.

#11
  1. What is DAO?
    Distributed Autonomous Organization, which has decentralized governance through smart contracts.
  2. What function had the vulnerability?
    ‘Split’ function - allowed the attacker to recursively call the split function and retrieved their funds multiple times before getting to the step where the code would check the balance.
  3. Why was the hard fork initiated?
    To rollback the hacker’s transaction and by that, return the stolen funds.
#12

DAO Hack

  • What is DAO?
    Decentralized Autonomous Organization

  • What function had the vulnerability?
    The smart contract recorded the refund after the funds were transmitted to the child DAO allowing the attacker to initiate a recursive request to repeat the refund transfer request before the original refund transaction was recorded within the smart contract ledger.

  • Why was the hard fork initiated?
    To overwrite the transactions initiated by the attack, return the multiple refund requests to the investors, and to facilitate a reboot of the contract after completion of a soft fork to ensure refund requests are recorded within the ledger prior to commuting said funds into the child DAO to prevent a “Recursive Call Exploit”.

#13
  1. Dao stands for a decentralized autonomous organization.
  2. The split function had vulnerability.
  3. The hard fork was initiated because the community of ethereum believed that the DAO hack was too bi go to let it go without any reaction. Community also deiscovered that Soft Fork could lead to some security issues therefore Hard For was choosed.
#14

  1. Distributed Autonomous Organizations. A DAO is another computer code through which a set of smart contracts are connected together and function as a governance mechanism.

  2. The transfer function when the chain was splitted into child contracts for the minority.

  3. To roll back the chain and made de transactions with stolen funds invalid.

#15

  1. What is DAO?
    Decentralized Autonomous Organization

  2. What function had the vulnerability?
    Creation of child DAO.

  3. Why was the hard fork initiated?
    To send back stolen funds.

#16

  1. What is DAO?
    DAO stands for distributed autonomous organizations, in this article it refers to a smart contract. The purpose of this smart contract was to raise fund to support projects.

  2. What function had the vulnerability?
    splitDAO function was vulnerable to a reentrancy attack, by creating a new proposal the attacker was able to create a child Dao and drain more fund that he was suppose to. We can see here why the check effect interaction pattern. is important.

  3. Why was the hard fork initiated?
    The hard fork was initiate because there was a debate between the Ethereum core developer. Some though that code is law and the blockchain should stay immutable and they don’t want to modify the state of the chain. On the other side as a lot of money was involved and an other part of the community want to fork the chain before the work happen to give back the fund to the users.
    This decision was made as there was no other way to get back the fund the attacker took.

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#17

DAO stands for distributed autonomous organizations. It is a organization that is governed by smart contracts.

The “split” function

The hard fork on the ethereum blockchain was initiated to overwrite the history and restore the stolen ethers. This reversed the all transactions happened after the starting point of the work.

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#18
  1. What is DAO?
    Distributed Autonomous Organizations
  2. What function had the vulnerability?
    The split function when its called.
  3. Why was the hard fork initiated?
    Vitalik and part of the community were favoring reversal of the fraud transactions and returning of the funds. The hack triggered a debate, was “immutability absolute”?
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#19
  1. Distributed autonomous organizations
  2. split function
  3. Hard fork leading to split of community to eth etc
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#20

  1. What is DAO?
    A regular DAO stands for decentralized autonomous organization and is essentially an organization governed by code. The DAO (referring to the DAO hack) was a venture capital fund run by smart contracts.

  2. What function had the vulnerability?
    The split function held the vulnerability for the re-entry attack or “recursive call exploit.”

  3. Why was the hard fork initiated?
    The hard fork was initiated because the DAO’s investors lost a lot of money and the majority of the community agreed they should do something–even though this violates the “code is law” ethos from whence Ethereum was founded.

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