Re:A successful Bitcoin double spend – USD 10000
by makomk on Friday March 15, 2013 @09:07PM
(#5383922)
I forget the exact problem with OpenSSL, but it accepts particular invalid representations of signatures that the applicable standards say it shouldn't accept, because it doesn't treat the sign bit as a sign bit. This isn't generally a problem because those numbers should never actually be negative, but it's an issue for Bitcoin because everyone needs to agree on which signatures are valid.
The BDB problem is not mysterious like you suggest, and the whole thing could've been converted from a fork to a DoS by changing a 'return false' to an 'assert'.