DAO - Reading Assignment

Ethereum Smart Contract Security Course
#21

1. What is DAO?
Distributed Autonomous Organization. A collection of smart contracts which govern an organization through voting by it’s token holders. DAO was also the name of the project by Slock.it which got hacked.

2. What function had the vulnerability?
split

3. Why was the hard fork initiated?
Initially they attempted a soft fork, but discovered it would introduce additional security flaws so it was abandoned. At this point the decision to hard fork was put to the community who decided the damage was too severe to ignore. The vote to hard fork passed. Once the hard fork completed the portion of the community who disagreed continued mining the old branch and Ethereum Classic was the result.

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#22
  1. Distributed autonomous organization
  2. Split function
  3. Because it was the only viable option and the one receiving the most votes by the miners as the amount of ether stolen was so significant.
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#23

  1. What is DAO?
    Distributed Autonomous Organization. A democracy governed by votes on the blockchain to make desicions about the usage of crowdfunding and voting.

  2. What function had the vulnerability?
    The split function when somebody did not agree with consensus and they made a child DAO

  3. Why was the hard fork initiated?
    Because the two parties was not agreeing on the outcome. Ethereum Classic did not want to roll back the chain and transactions to save the investors. They wanted to keep the contract immutable while Ethereum wanted to get the funds back from the hacker.

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#24

  1. What is DAO?

    • Stands for 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. What function had the vulnerability?

    • The Split function

  3. Why was the hard fork initiated?

    • To rewrite the blockchain and return stolen funds. Soft fork had too many security flaws.A
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#25
  1. DAO is newly brought concept of decentralized autonomous organization
  2. Split function in the DAO
  3. Because majority of particpants agreed to reverse the fund transferred to Child DAO induced by hack and that could be done only by hardfork
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#26
  1. Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAO) is a set of smart contracts connected together and function as a governance mechanism.
  2. The split function.
  3. Ether community got split with two different opinions. some want to return the stolen ether and others don’t.
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#27

A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization.
The DAO is a particular DAO, which was infamously hacked.

The idea is that smart contracts work together to carry out the governance and implementation of payments within the participating community.

The split function, which allowed for child DAOs to be formed, had a “recursive call” vulnerability and an attacker was able to siphon off over 3 million ETH.

The hard fork was initiated because Vitalik and other Ethereum foundation people decided that a soft fork would have too many vulnerabilities and they did not want the hackers to be so handsomely rewarded. Maybe they wanted to help people get their Ether back as well.

Ultimately it was initiated because that’s something that can be done on the Ethereum blockchain. I’m not sure how much trouble it was.

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#28 
1. What is DAO?
	a. Distributed Autonomous Organization
	b.  a decentralised governance through smart contracts
2. What function had the vulnerability?
	a. split function
	b. the attacker make a recursive call on it and retrieved the funds again and again 
	c. the problem was that you can retrieve funds and afterwards the balance will be checked
	d. it was also called "recursive call exploit"
3. Why was the hard fork initiated?
	a. the soft-fork was discarded because of security flaws
	b. the majority of Ethereum Network voted for the hard fork
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#29

  1. DAO was the first decentralized autonomous organization which is based on different interacting smart contracts. These smart contracts represents a governance mechanism. In short, the DAO was a venture capital fund where investors governing the DAO. All funds raised from the investors were pooled and you got an amount of token in proportion of your investment. Token holders could submit proposals for funding a project by using the DAO funds.

  2. The vulnerability was a re-entrency attack where the attack could change the control flow of the smart contract. To avoid suppressing the minority by the majority inside the smart contracts of the DAO a “protection function” (equivalent to appraisal right) was implemented where anybody could split the DAO in two (so called Child DAO). You have to submit a special form of proposal and then the minority could move their Ether into the new child DAO. The split function contained the ability for a re entrency attack because inside the function because the effect (set balance/fund to 0) was checked after and not before sending the funds.

  3. The hard fork was initiated because the majority agreed to it and they want to role the transaction back and refund the victims.

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#30
  1. What is DAO? (Distributive autonomous organizations) is another computer code through which a set of smart contracts are connected together and function as a governance mechanism.
  2. What function had the vulnerability? Split function was introduced by creators to protect the minority. This ability split the DAO into two giving the minority to retrieve their funds.
  3. Why was the hard fork initiated? To overwrite the history and restore the stolen ethers.
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#31
  1. 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.

  1. What function had the vulnerability?

Split function that was able retrieved their funds multiple times before getting to the step where the code would check the balance.

  1. Why was the hard fork initiated?

The soft fork was scheduled to be activated on 30 June. However, due to additional security flaws it would pose, the soft-fork was discarded. According to proponents of the hard fork, the hack was too big to let go.

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#32

A DAO is a distributed autonomous origanization, meaning an organization that is fully based on smart contract connected together to function as a governance machanism. Basically it is a DApp acting as a virtual organization. The DApp implements mechanisms completele based on programmed rules that allow token-holders to vote and govern the particular organization by this way.

The vulnerable function was the split function that allowed users to leave this organization and build their own one, moving all funds to this new org. The idea behind it was to have a protection mechanism for minorities not reflected by the majority of the stake-holders. Basically it was the implementation of a known mechanism in “real-world” organisations by using smart contracts.

Basically it was the final ethereum community decision to have a hard fork after the previous decision of a soft-fork had failed because they were not able to implement it in the tight timeframe, leaving some security flaws.

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#33

@jsd @cherrybluemoon ok :rofl:

Using google is really useful in our job, and i am googling a lot of stuff everyday, but we were expecting something a bit more personal :joy:

DAO
DAO961×326 45.2 KB

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#34

@gabba

  1. What is DAO?

The DAO is designed to be automated and decentralized based on smart contract (predefined business rule, distributed on multiple servers node for code execution and based on the cosensus algorithm for the validation) that do not have a typical management structure (emrirical structure with board members).

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#35
  1. What is DAO?

A decentralised Autonomous Organisation. Basically an organisation, defined by a smart contract.

  1. What function had the vulnerability?

The split function

  1. Why was the hard fork initiated?

Some of the community wanted to rollback the attack, others wanted to preserve the immutability of the chain. This debate resulted in a hard fork.

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#36
  1. What is DAO?

Stands for Distributed Autonomous Organisation.
A set of co-operating smart contracts that remove the need for manual governance.

  1. What function had the vulnerability?

The Split function acts as a way to allows minority voters to opt out and get their money back.
The vulnerability allowed the attacker to do a recursive call that kept withdrawing.

  1. Why was the hard fork initiated?

Advocates for “code is law” immutable contracts idea were against the Eth being returned to investors.
In the end the Ethereum community voted to create a new blockchain that would allow this to happen.

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#37

1 - What is DAO?

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

2 - What function had the vulnerability?

The split() had the vulnerability.

3 - Why was the hard fork initiated?

The hard fork was initiated because a faction of the Ethereum developer community did not want to roll back transaction and refund victims of the attack.
As such, they created a hard fork and thus Ethereum Classic was born.

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#38

What is DAO?
It is a distributed autonomous organization.

What function had the vulnerability?
The function of retrieve their funds when a proposal that they do not want to be part of is approved despite their objection.

Why was the hard fork initiated?
Due to the hack that stole approximately 3.6 million Ether, various solutions were proposed, first the soft fork was voted but this was going to generate security flaws, so the community voted for the hard fork for those affected to recover their funds.

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#39

  1. What is DAO?
    The first decentralized autonomous organization that launched and that suffered an attack draining it of ~$150M of funds due to a re-entrancy vulnerability.

  2. What function had the vulnerability?
    The Split function.

  3. Why was the hard fork initiated?
    There was a limited amount of time for a solution to be implemented. The soft-fork option was discovered to have introduced additional security flaws, thus the atomic hard-fork option was issued which effectively reversed the history of the attacker’s transaction.

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#40

  1. DAO is distributed autonomous organisation - a set of smart contracts function together as a goverance mechanism

  2. The split function had the vulnerability

  3. The hard fork was initiated to return stolen funds to the investors

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