Update on Transaction Malleability
bitcoinfoundation.org
bitcoinfoundation.org
You'll note that mtgox had funds taken from it, none of these other sites are. They're just being flooded with junk that screws up their transaction processing. It's not really the same thing at all.
Source, please? How much did mtgox lose?
I do not know how much they lost. Most of my discussion with them was before I think they knew exactly how much they lost. I had assumed, by the nature of the issue, that it wasn't likely to be much. I'm a little less sure of it based on their behavior since this weekend and due to finding out that there software was automatically issuing reissuing transactions that it didn't think had been paid out.
(1) Find all confirmed transactions that have a signature that appears in non-canonical form (and thus likely confirmed under an unexpected TXID);
(2) For those transactions, identify the paid-to addresses and amounts: possible targets of make-up transactions. (Of course, it may be hard to distinguish true targets from 'change'.)
(3) Find later transactions with the exact same paid-to addresses and amount: these may be erroneously-issued repeat payouts.
Of course, if the complaining user offers a different address for the make-up transaction, this wouldn't work. On the other hand, a researcher already working hard to correlate affiliated addresses, now or in the future, still might be able to surmise when duplicate-amounts went to affiliated-addresses in succession during the active exploitation period.
Unfortunately, you can't— MtGox had a long standing bug where they would author transactions which were themselves non-canonical form (they encoded the variable length values in DER as fixed length with excessive padding). This is one of the reasons their transactions were getting stuck.
People mutating their transactions removed the padding, making them canonical.
That seems more prone to false-positives, though, and perhaps after some point the flood of copycat non-canonicals becomes a problem. (On the other hand, if MtGox was fairly unique for a while in issuing a particular kind of non-canonical transaction, it could make mapping their affiliated addresses by some larger effort easier.)
Some researchers might have records of most of the alternate transactions that were circulating without being confirmed. For example, I don't know how comprehensive Blockchain.info's double-spend report – https://blockchain.info/double-spends – is, but I imagine TXID-mutated variations might appear as double-spends there. It's currently reporting 1126 detected double-spends - over 1000 in the last 3 days, but before then, quite rare.)
"In the meantime, exchanges and wallet services - and any service sending coins directly to third parties - should be extremely careful with anyone claiming their transaction did not go through."
...and nullc's speculation just before the latest blamestorming (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x93tf/some_irc_cha...)...
"Worse, some of this may have resulted in users getting paid multiple times and could have been intentionally triggered with that end in mind if someone helpfully fixed some transactions and then noticed they got paid twice. (I think this is unlikely to have caused large losses, before people run off worrying about that, both because of the reuse of the oldest inputs and because of the hot wallet/cold wallet split)."
Thus I find it reasonable to surmise, based on MtGox's own description of the risk, that MtGox has in some cases issued unnecessary redundant payments to customers complaining that "it's been days and the TXID you reported still hasn't shown up!"
An earlier MtGox issue nullc also mentions – using too-young coins – could similarly have resulted in double-payments. (MtGox issues a transaction that can't confirm; customer complains and gets 2nd transaction issued that confirms; first transaction later confirms when coins have aged enough.) If so, that perhaps helped train MtGox customers, even if not MtGox itself, for the redundant-payment potential from malleability.
Where is it written that it was a script kiddi. If this was the work of just a script kiddie, we would be seeing incidents like this all the time.