Skip to content
OpenAdvisories
Medium · 5.3 CVE-2021-41138 EUVD-2021-2260GHSA-vj62-g63v-f8mf

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

Published Oct 13, 2021 · Updated Aug 4, 2024 · Assigned by GitHub_M

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

VendorProductAffectedFixed
paritytech frontier < 146bb48 —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
crates.io pallet-ethereum <= 3.0.0 — GHSA-vj62-g63v-f8mf

References