Polygon Labs revealed that it has fixed a set of security vulnerabilities in the Polygon PoS network through two hard forks. The relevant upgrades were privately deployed before the public announcement and were then launched on the mainnet after verification on the Amoy testnet.
Austin and Kyoto have taken effect.
These two upgrades are respectively the Austin hard fork for Bor clients, and the Kyoto hard fork for Heimdall clients. Polygon indicates that such repairs that affect consensus security are usually carried out quietly first, and only disclosed to the public after the mainnet's security is ensured.
Among them, Austin mainly fixes two denial-of-service paths in block processing. One issue involves malicious block producers constructing blocks with excessively large data fields, which can lead to the collapse of peer nodes.
The most serious issue involves the burden on verifiers across the entire network.
Kyoto addressed a number of issues related to consensus reinforcement. Polygon states that one of the most severe vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to force the entire set of validators to perform costly collaborative processing with just a single specially crafted transaction.
The construction cost of such transactions is not high in itself, but they significantly increase the network processing overhead, which in turn affects the operational burden on verifiers and the stability of the network.
The disclosure timing coincides with the completion of the POL migration.
Polygon emphasizes that there is no evidence that these vulnerabilities have been exploited on the mainnet, and the related fixes were taken proactively. Both upgrades have now become mandatory updates for node operators and do not require state migration or re-synchronization.
This disclosure occurred after Polygon completed the migration of MATIC to POL. This migration was part of its network architecture adjustments, and the outside world is also paying attention to the stability of the upgraded network and the recovery of its ecosystem.
On the market front, this news did not significantly boost the price of POL. According to CoinGecko data, POL reached around $0.09983 on Sunday, with a 2.3% decline over 24 hours and a roughly 6.8% drop in the past 7 days. Looking at its performance within the year, POL has seen a cumulative decline of about 60.8% over the past year, and its current market value is approximately $1.07 billion.
