Vulnerability · Published Oct 13, 2021 · Assigned by GitHub_M
CVE-2021-41138Validity check for signed Frontier-specific extrinsic not called in block execution
Medium 5.3
In plain English
A medium-severity improper input validation in frontier from paritytech. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 1.4% (higher than 72% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
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`.
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| paritytech | frontier | < 146bb48 |
Weakness: CWE-20 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
References
- https://github.com/paritytech/frontier/security/advisories/GHSA-vj62-g63v-f8mf x_refsource_CONFIRM
- https://github.com/paritytech/frontier/pull/497 x_refsource_MISC
- https://github.com/paritytech/frontier/commit/146bb48849e5393004be5c88beefe76fdf009aba x_refsource_MISC