Arbitrum suspends new Stylus contract activation to address risk of AI-assisted attacks

PANews reported on October 3 that according to the Arbitrum Security Committee report, in order to deal with the risk of increasingly complex AI-assisted attacks, Arbitrum has taken emergency action at around 23:30 on October 2, Beijing time, to temporarily prevent the activation of new Stylus contracts on the Arbitrum One and Nova networks.

This restriction mainly targets programs and application updates that require new activation. Already activated Stylus applications can continue to run, and ordinary Solidity contract deployment and execution are not affected. Arbitrum officials stated that this preventive measure stems from the threat of WebAssembly program attack on the non-standard Stylus compiler tool chain. No risk of fund theft has been found so far. The main concern is the activity on the chain and denial of service (DoS) attacks. Developers can still extend the life cycle of existing programs through the license-free keep-alive renewal mechanism, but they cannot activate expired programs or new versions of applications.