Around 12:00 PST, an unknown attacker exploited a critical flaw in the Parity multi-signature wallet on the Ethereum network, draining three massive wallets of over $31,000,000 worth of Ether in a matter of minutes. – A hacker stole $31M of Ether by Haseeb Qureshi

This is a nice article on how a hacker stole $31M of Ethereum (cryptocurrency). It explains why Ethereum is different from Bitcoin, something I hadn’t known, and explains how the hack worked and how it was thwarted. Well-written and worth a read for the more deeply curious.

The one quibble with the article is that the author states, “Mistakes of this sort are routinely made in programming.”. That’s true, of course, but a platitude and not a good excuse. Ethereum is special, and standard security rules should apply when building dispatch mechanisms. The author notes that “The safer approach here would be to whitelist specific methods that the user is allowed to call.” Yes, always dispatch with a whitelist or some affirmative action on the part of the programmer. The default is deny, not allow. A quick search found an article from CERT that points to a 1975 article that in turn mentions the principle was first suggested by E. Glaser in 1965.

A while ago I write an article on dispatch, don’t decorate, where I mention that you should use patterns for dispatch. It’s a subtle mention, because the point of the article is about using dispatch not decorators. If the Ethereum author had used a pattern-match for allow instead of a pattern match for deny (“internal”), this problem would not have occurred.

Here’s what we do in what we do in Sirepo for method dispatch in the server:

def func_for_api(api_name, api_module):
    res = getattr(api_module, _FUNC_PREFIX + api_name, None)
    # Be very restrictive for this since we are calling arbitrary code
    assert res and isinstance(res, types.FunctionType), \
        '{}: unknown api in {}'.format(api_name, api_module.__name__)
    return res

The pattern here is FUNC_PREFIX, which is “api_” so only methods that begin with “api_” would be called. That’s the “whitelist” that the article’s author talks about. You don’t need a whitelist as that has to be maintained and audited. What you want is a name that identifies the function as a dispatch item. There are some subtleties in choosing the name. It contains an underscore so that it doesn’t collide with builtins in Python. It doesn’t begin with an underscore so we know it is a public method. Note also that “func_for_api” asserts the object is a function (not some other callable). And, if the method has some bug, it’ll not dispatch (return the method) by default. That’s pointed out in the CERT article as well.

Dispatch is common programming nowadays. Just make sure it requires the programmer to state explicitly that the dispatch is allowed.