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CVE-2021-41138GHSA-VJ62-G63V-F8MF

Validity check for signed Frontier-specific extrinsic not called in block execution

Published
Last modified
published
Not listed in CISA KEV
Fix
Fixed in 146bb48
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub

Summary

Frontier is Substrate's Ethereum compatibility layer. 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. The issue is patched in commit `146bb48849e5393004be5c88beefe76fdf009aba`.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • paritytech frontier

    fixed in 146bb48

  • pallet-ethereumcrates.io

    through 3.0.0

References 3

GitHub · paritytech/frontier