Ethereum consensus layer client Prysm releases post-mortem analysis report on Fusaka mainnet incident

ChainCatcher news, the Ethereum consensus layer client Prysm team has released a post-mortem analysis report on the Fusaka mainnet incident. During the event, almost all Prysm nodes experienced resource exhaustion when processing specific attestations, resulting in their inability to respond to validator requests in a timely manner. The impact range was from epoch 411439 to 411480, with 248 blocks lost over 42 epochs, a missing rate of 18.5%. The network participation rate dropped to a minimum of 75%, and validators lost approximately 382 ETH in attestation rewards.

The root cause of the failure was that Prysm beacon nodes received attestations possibly sent by unsynchronized nodes, which referenced block roots from previous rounds. To verify these attestations, Prysm attempted to reconstruct compatible states, leading to repeated processing of past round blocks and costly round transition recalculations. The team temporarily resolved the issue by guiding users to use the --disable-last-epoch-target parameter, and subsequent versions v7.1 and v7.1.0 include long-term fixes.