A high severity Bitcoin Core Vulnerability affected older node versions before developers quietly fixed it in a new update.
A newly disclosed bug in Bitcoin Core put part of Bitcoin‘s node network at risk of crashing if a Bitcoin miner produced a specially crafted block.
The bug, tracked as CVE-2024-52911 and disclosed in a Tuesday blog post, May 5, affected Bitcoin Core versions after 0.14.0 and before 29.0. According to the post, Bitcoin Core 29.0, released in April 2025, included the fix.
The bug did not put wallets or Bitcoin balances at direct risk. Instead, its practical impact was a potential crash of vulnerable nodes during validation of a malicious block.
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Exploit Needed Real Bitcoin Mining Power
The attack would have required a sufficient mining power. Bitcoin Core developers said exploitation depended on producing a block with valid proof-of-work, making it a costly scenario rather than a typical remote attack. They wrote:
“An attacker capable of mining a block with sufficient proof-of-work could have exploited this to crash victim nodes.”
The flaw was in Bitcoin Core’s script validation process, where the software checks parts of a block in the background.
With some specially crafted invalid blocks, Bitcoin Core could delete data that was still needed for those checks. A background validation thread could then try to read data that was already gone, the post reads.
The disclosure described it as a “use-after-free” bug, a memory-safety issue that can cause software to crash. Developers said remote code execution was theoretically possible, though “constraints on the input (block) data make this unlikely.”
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