A ‘simple’ hard fork could defeat a quantum attack on Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said Ethereum is already “well positioned” to mitigate the impact of a massive quantum computing attack on the network.

In a March 9 post to Ethereum Research, Buterin discussed what would happen if a “quantum emergency” happened tomorrow.

“If quantum computers become available tomorrow and bad actors already have access to them, they could use them to steal users' money,” Buterin posted.

In fact, I'd argue that we're already well on our way to making a simple recovery fork to handle this kind of situation.

“Blockchain should be hard forked and users should download new wallet software, but few users will lose their money,” he added.

Buterin explained that such a hard fork process involved rolling back the Ethereum network to the point where it was clear that “massive theft” was occurring and from that point it was disabling all traditional transactions.

Ethereum developers add a new transaction type – part of RIP-7560 – to allow transactions from modern contract wallets.

When a user makes a transaction from their Ethereum wallet, the signature of the transaction reveals their public key, and in the “post-quantum world” this will see the user's private key revealed.

The new type of transaction, which is a core part of the quantum-adversarial EIP, will ensure the conversion of Winternitz's signatures and zero-knowledge verification technologies to wallets known as “STARKs” into a new verification code, he added.

This verification code uses an ERC-4337 token digest – the core technology of smart contract wallets – to prevent private keys from being exposed when signing future transactions.

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According to Buterin, users who never approve a transaction from an Ethereum wallet are “already safe” from any quantum-related exploits, because only the wallet address is made publicly available.

Infrastructure that needs to be implemented, such as the dry fork, could in principle start building tomorrow, he added.

The advent of quantum computing has been a long-feared inflection point for the crypto industry, as a once-untouchable computer capable of breaking blockchain encryption has led to massive and rapid theft of user funds.

However, most computer scientists and developers believe that quantum computing is still a long way off, with Google and IBM engineers predicting that quantum computing will not be sufficiently developed until 2029.

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