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CVE-2022-23507GHSA-XQQC-C5GW-C5R5

Light client verification not taking into account chain ID

Published
Last modified
published
Not listed in CISA KEV
Fix
Fixed in 0.28.0
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
  • Exploitation: none
  • Automatable: no
  • Technical impact: partial

Summary

Tendermint is a high-performance blockchain consensus engine for Byzantine fault tolerant applications. Versions prior to 0.28.0 contain a potential attack via Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature, affecting anyone using the tendermint-light-client and related packages to perform light client verification (e.g. IBC-rs, Hermes). The light client does not check that the chain IDs of the trusted and untrusted headers match, resulting in a possible attack vector where someone who finds a header from an untrusted chain that satisfies all other verification conditions (e.g. enough overlapping validator signatures) could fool a light client. The attack vector is currently theoretical, and no proof-of-concept exists yet to exploit it on live networks. This issue is patched in version 0.28.0. There are no workarounds.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. CISA SSVC assessment

    Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial

  3. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • informalsystems tendermint-rs

    0.28.0

  • tendermint-light-client-verifiercrates.io

    fixed in 0.28.0

  • tendermint-light-clientcrates.io

    fixed in 0.28.0

  • tendermint-light-client-jscrates.io

    fixed in 0.28.0

References 1

GitHub · informalsystems/tendermint-rs