vyper
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vyperlang
VIP: use reentrancy lock by default
Simple Summary
Change how reentrancy protection is applied by having external calls use the nonreentrant guard decorator (with a default key) instead of the 2300 gas stipend.
Motivation
The 2300 gas stipend as a protection against reentrant behavior by malicious callers is widely regarded as a bad idea leading to misuse by developers that enable difficult bugs. Similarly, the actual 2300 gas value was chosen to align with a particular set of costs that will potentially change during future upgrades. It is a best practice not to assume gas costs with stay the same with a particular set of operations, so it is important that our codebase also does not make assumptions on gas cost.
The nonreentrant decorator guard was added in #1204. It is currently an "opt-in" feature, requiring that users specify guards on their code with a key that groups together different uses of the guard within their code. This VIP proposes that in general, certain types of external calls (such as send, maybe others) be guarded with a default key without configuration, or otherwise force the use of the decorator somehow to ensure that adequate protection is in place. This would allow us to deprecate the 2300 gas guard in lieu of this superior protection mechanism.
Specification
TBD
Backwards Compatibility
This VIP would change current behavior of Vyper contracts, which would need to be well documented and understood by others. It is important that the default key chosen not interfere with other uses of the guard, as well as have a predictable value so that guards can be determined via static analysis without prior knowledge of the version of Vyper used.
Dependencies
Dependent on #1204
Copyright
Copyright and related rights waived via CC0
This VIP is deferred because the accepted practice is to assume the 2300 gas stipend on Ether transfers from contracts (to which we add 0 additional gas to the default EVM stipend). If this accepted practice changes, this VIP would be the way to accomplish the goal of protecting against reentrancy attacks when using the send(address) function
