CVE-2022-23507 Light client verification not taking into account chain ID

What is CVE-2022-23507?

CVE-2022-23507 is a medium-severity vulnerability in informalsystems tendermint-rs, published on 15 Dec 2022. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Tendermint is a high-performance blockchain consensus engine for Byzantine fault tolerant applications. Versions prior to 0.28.0 contain a potential attack via Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature, affecting anyone using the tendermint-light-client and related packages to perform light client verification (e.g. IBC-rs, Hermes). The light client does not check that the chain IDs of the trusted and untrusted headers match, resulting in a possible attack vector where someone who finds a header from an untrusted chain that satisfies all other verification conditions (e.g. enough overlapping validator signatures) could fool a light client. The attack vector is currently theoretical, and no proof-of-concept exists yet to exploit it on live networks. This issue is patched in version 0.28.0. There are no workarounds.

Weakness: CWE-347

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-23507?

6 open source packages ship an affected version, including tendermint-light-client, tendermint-light-client-js and tendermint-light-client-verifier. It affects 3 products.

Products include Tendermint-Light-Client-Js Project Tendermint-Light-Client-Js, Tendermint-Light-Client-Verifier Project Tendermint-Light-Client-Verifier, Tendermint-Light-Client Project Tendermint-Light-Client.

How do I fix CVE-2022-23507?

Upgrade tendermint-light-client to 0.28.0 or later.

Is CVE-2022-23507 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-23507 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Sources

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

Also known as GHSA-xqqc-c5gw-c5r5.