Arbitrum Haults New Stylus Activations Amid AI-Driven Attack Risks

Arbitrum's Security Council has taken emergency action to pause new Stylus contract activations on Arbitrum One and Nova due to concerns over AI-assisted attacks. The move aims to prevent increasingly sophisticated hand-crafted WebAssembly programs from exploiting known bugs in the Stylus compiler toolchain.

The restrictions do not affect already-active Stylus applications or ordinary Solidity contract deployment and execution, according to the Council's report. However, new contract instances requiring fresh activation cannot become executable during this period.

Arbitrum's documentation distinguishes between storing code and making it usable, with Stylus contracts running WebAssembly programs that need activation to become executable. The Council has implemented the restriction by raising the activation gas requirement to a prohibitively expensive level.