failed to deserialize extra field

Question

I've started simplewallet together with bitmonerod and looking into simplewallet.log file I can see something like this:

2016-Sep-08 12:01:29.853608 [RPC0]Transaction extra has unsupported format: <c24dcecfe0ad013293600321caf59e22582f87c180264d592a02bb2d5edb7b42>
2016-Sep-08 12:01:29.857208 [RPC0]failed to deserialize extra field. extra = 0108b69d5bfdade32af5c14910f637fb72039cd9bec2353367f3ecd8958ac69d130221009a40d25b6c84e7993aed986da4d428eb33b050ccc40aba4f53dec3c779b92955de208af73ef76e6b9799f12d4883177198e75cb45ba694def49c036a1cadb965ebca

There is more entries like this in log file. Can someone explain what does it mean?

I'm running 'Hydrogen Helix' (v0.9.4.0-release) in screen.

Answer 1

According to moneromooo-monero, it may be that someone is adding invalid TX extra by using a custom software, on purpose or by error. Therefore when the usual daemon receive the transaction, it is not possible to decode the value.

I'm guessing someone hacked the tx_extra code, or is using an entirely new tx_extra generator. These have a pubkey field, but either garbage after it, or too much data in it, so the rest of the parsing gets out of sync.

I use hack in the original sense, like I hack on monero

This is not dangerous so the level of warning have been downgraded in PR #831. The problem have then been solved by adding a new type of extra TX ("tx_extra_mysterious_minergate") in PR #856.

The fix have been merged on Jun 19 so it not present in v0.9.4 but will be in v0.10.0.