Optimism quietly patches a critical testnet flaw after a tip-off from a rival.

layer 2 network optimism OP

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discovered two critical vulnerabilities on its testnet and repaired them at least a few weeks later.

Offchain Labs, which first discovered the vulnerability, said on Friday that Optimism had updated its testnet on April 25. The security flaw, which has since been fixed, allowed malicious actors to manipulate records on the chain and launch other “sophisticated attacks,” the software company said.

On March 22, Offchain Labs alerted Optimism to two issues with its testnet. A malicious actor can force the OP Stack anti-fraud mechanism to accept fraudulent chain records, and an abuser can prevent it from accepting correct chain records.

“This is a difficult problem to solve,” Offchain Labs, a competitor of Optimism, said in a statement. Anti-fraud protocols and timing aspects are “very difficult” to design, he added.

According to Offchain Labs, Optimism later fixed the vulnerability by modifying its timer handling code. To be sure, layer 2 testnets, or test networks, exist to identify security flaws in the network before its official launch.

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