Network not being able to confirm new transactions (total network shutdown)
RPC API crash affecting projects with greater than or equal to 25% of the market capitalization on top of the respective layer
Description
Brief/Intro
Archivers can join network without any staking. Network has a max limit for archivers to join, but shardus-core has a bug that allows more than MAX limit archiver to join the network.
This bug can harm network in many ways, for example it disallows any other archiver from joining the network, or when a node wants to join/left the network, it finds a random archiver and requests some data from it, because a malicious actor can join it's archivers more than specified limit, it is possible that every time a node selects a random archiver that archiver is one of these malicious ones. So bad actor can return invalid data and break the network. Another example which i provided a POC for it, can completely disable archivers functionality to save Cycle data, so history of blockchain would be lost forever.
I will explain the problem here and provide a POC after.
Vulnerability Details
For an archiver to join the network, it should send a http request to a node. Node handles request here: