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CVE-2021-41138: Validity check missing in Frontier

October 13, 2021 (updated October 24, 2024)

In the newly introduced signed Frontier-specific extrinsic for pallet-ethereum, a large part of transaction validation logic was only called in transaction pool validation, but not in block execution. Malicious validators can take advantage of this to put invalid transactions into a block.

The attack is limited in that the signature is always validated, and the majority of the validation is done again in the subsequent pallet-evm execution logic. However, do note that a chain ID replay attack was possible. In addition, spamming attacks are of main concerns, while they are limited by Substrate block size limits and other factors.

References

  • github.com/advisories/GHSA-vj62-g63v-f8mf
  • github.com/paritytech/frontier/commit/146bb48849e5393004be5c88beefe76fdf009aba
  • github.com/paritytech/frontier/pull/495
  • github.com/paritytech/frontier/pull/497
  • github.com/paritytech/frontier/security/advisories/GHSA-vj62-g63v-f8mf
  • github.com/polkadot-evm/frontier
  • nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-41138

Code Behaviors & Features

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Affected versions

All versions up to 3.0.0

Solution

Unfortunately, there is no solution available yet.

Impact 5.3 MEDIUM

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N

Learn more about CVSS

Weakness

  • CWE-20: Improper Input Validation

Source file

cargo/pallet-ethereum/CVE-2021-41138.yml

Spotted a mistake? Edit the file on GitLab.

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