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High · 7.5 CVE-2023-28431 EUVD-2023-0996GHSA-fcmm-54jp-7vf6

Frontier's modexp precompile is slow for even modulus

Published Mar 22, 2023 · Updated Feb 25, 2025 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

Frontier is an Ethereum compatibility layer for Substrate. Frontier's `modexp` precompile uses `num-bigint` crate under the hood. In the implementation prior to pull request 1017, the cases for modulus being even and modulus being odd are treated separately. Odd modulus uses the fast Montgomery multiplication, and even modulus uses the slow plain power algorithm. This gas cost discrepancy was not accounted for in the `modexp` precompile, leading to possible denial of service attacks.

No fixes for `num-bigint` are currently available, and thus this issue is fixed in the short term by raising the gas costs for even modulus, and in the long term fixing it in `num-bigint` or switching to another modexp implementation. The short-term fix for Frontier is deployed at pull request 1017. There are no known workarounds aside from applying the fix.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
paritytech frontier <= 0.1.0 —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
crates.io pallet-evm-precompile-modexp <= 1.0.0 — GHSA-fcmm-54jp-7vf6

References