Parity comes clean on $160 million Ether freeze

The development team behind Parity’s Ethereum software has released new information on the critical code fault that caused $160m worth of Ether to be frozen. At the present time, there is no immediate solution to allow those affected to regain access to their funds. The Parity team has acknowledged that the situation has caused distress and anxiety for the wider community, and especially those involved and that they are working on a solution to the problem. The post [https://paritytech.io/blog/security-is-a-process-a-postmortem-on-the-parity-multi-sig-library-self-destruct.html] has stated that there is currently no set timeline for the release of the frozen Ether. The current consensus is that a platform-wide upgrade may be required to restore total functionality to the 500 wallets that have been affected. The frozen funds were caused by a hack that saw the code library that supports some wallets on Parity to be “accidentally” deleted. The wallets affected are multi-signature wallets; those that require the use of multiple keys in order to issue transactions. The post from the development team working on the problem states that the issue was caused by an oversight in the coding of the wallets. While the risk was noted on Github back in August, the Parity team misinterpreted it and so took no further action. When it comes to trying to find a solution, Parity has said they are working on improvements to the Ethereum protocols that will hopefully offer a way to restore access to the affected funds. Following the attack, the wider community has been discussing whether or not updating the code would, in essence, be a “bail-out” similar to the DAO controversy. When it comes to getting the locked funds released, Parity has stated that they intend to work closely with the Ethereum Foundation and wider community to develop further protocols and bug fixes.