CVE-2020-26242 Denial of service in geth

What is CVE-2020-26242?

CVE-2020-26242 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in go-ethereum, published on 25 Nov 2020. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Go Ethereum, or "Geth", is the official Golang implementation of the Ethereum protocol. In Geth before version 1.9.18, there is a Denial-of-service (crash) during block processing. This is fixed in 1.9.18.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-26242?

5 open source packages ship an affected version, including github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum and github.com/holiman/uint256. It affects 1 product.

Products include Ethereum Go Ethereum.

How do I fix CVE-2020-26242?

Upgrade github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum to 1.9.18 or later.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2020-26242 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2020-26242 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in go-ethereum

• CVE-2026-26314 Go Ethereum affected by DoS via malicious p2p message High 8.7
• CVE-2023-42319 go-ethereum vulnerable to denial of service via crafted GraphQL query High 7.5
• CVE-2023-40591 Denial of service via malicious p2p message in go-ethereum High 7.5
• CVE-2021-42219 Denial of service in go-ethereum High 7.5
• CVE-2022-23327 Denial of Service in Go-Ethereum High 7.5

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-jm5c-rv3w-w83m, GO-2021-0103.