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Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone tried analyzing the actual blockchain for likely malleated (malled?) transactions? Depending on which form of malleability was exploited (see: https://gist.github.com/sipa/8907691) it should be fairly easy to separate "normal" transactions generated by "normal" clients and intentionally malleated transactions.

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Yes it would be possible to detect "malleated" transactions with high confidence for certain classes of malleability[0]. I'm not aware of anyone having done such analysis yet.

[0] The types of transactions that are less likely to catch false positives would probably be those that have "superfluous scriptSig operations". For other classes of malleability, it would be more difficult to tell whether a given transaction was the result of a malleability attack or if it was just a transaction produced by an alternative client.

The past tense is "malleableized".

Malleable is a descriptive adjective (not a verb)[1]

Malleability is a property-noun (also not a verb)[2]

These words do not have "past-tenses"

[1] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...

[2] http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/malleability

The verb malleate (shape with a hammer), related to the adjective malleable (able to be shaped as with a hammer), has the past tense malleated (as grandparent comment properly intuits).

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/malleate#Verb

FYI, GCIDE lists "malleate" citing 1913 webster as a transitive verb:

Malleate \Mal"le*ate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Malleated}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Malleating}.] [L. malleatus hammered, fr. malleus a hammer. See {Mall}, v. t.] To hammer; to beat into a plate or leaf. [1913 Webster]

A transaction is not "malleable" in the hammer-hitting sense. It is only "malleable" in the abstract sense (of pliable). It makes more (common usage) sense to "exploit the transactions malleability" (pliability) than to say the transaction was "malleated" (ie, hit by a hammer). That's all I was trying to point out.

Given that "malleable"'s meaning has evolved from the same root, you're being pedantic.

"Modified"?

Mauled.

"Bent"? Analogy to bent money seems apt.

Reshaped

"Mutated."

"Malleability" is the property of transactions that aspects of their serialization format can be changed without invalidating them. Actually changing transactions is called "mutation", the past tense of which is "mutated".

"Mutability" would make sense in that context rather than "malleability", no?

Yes, but "malleability" is the established word in the technical literature.

I've seen a lot of people using "mutated". There is not a good verbification of "malleable".

Doesn't "malleable" literally mean something like "shapeable with a hammer," from the Latin malleus, "hammer"? Maybe the verb form should be "hammered."

I am a little more inclined to believe MtGox being hammered had something to do with this fiasco.

Drunk on the Kool Aid....

There's "malleate", which really truly does go with "malleable". But it has only the original literal meaning of "beat into shape with a hammer" and not the generalized meaning implicit in "malleable".

Eh, we can change that.

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