CVE-2021-41138 Validity check for signed Frontier-specific extrinsic not called in block execution
Malicious validators can insert invalid transactions into blocks due to missing validation during execution, enabling chain ID replay attacks and spam.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2021-41138?
CVE-2021-41138 is a medium-severity vulnerability in paritytech frontier, published on 13 Oct 2021. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
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`.
Weakness: CWE-20
Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-41138?
2 open source packages ship an affected version, including pallet-ethereum. It affects 1 product.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
pallet-ethereum crates.io | All versions to 3.0.0 | None |
pallet-ethereum crates.io | All versions to 3.0.0 | None |
Products include Parity Frontier.
How do I fix CVE-2021-41138?
No fix has been published for CVE-2021-41138 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Is CVE-2021-41138 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-41138 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in paritytech frontier
- CVE-2023-45130 Frontier opcode SUICIDE touches too many storage values on large contracts
- CVE-2023-28431 Frontier's modexp precompile is slow for even modulus
- CVE-2022-36008 Message length overflow in frontier
- CVE-2022-21685 Integer underflow in Frontier
- CVE-2022-39242 Incorrect Calculation in Frontier leads to inflated Ethereum chain gas prices
Sources
Also known as GHSA-vj62-g63v-f8mf.