CVE-2022-46173 Elrond go Processing: fallback search of SCRs when not found in the main cache

High 7.2 Published 28 Dec 2022 Updated 11 Apr 2025

A flaw in Elrond-GO causes nodes to stop notarizing metachain blocks when processing specific cross-shard transactions, leading to a denial of service.

Exploited in the wild: Not known
Login needed: Not needed
Attackable: Over the internet
Victim action needed: Not needed
Fix: Available

What is CVE-2022-46173?

CVE-2022-46173 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in ElrondNetwork elrond-go, published on 28 Dec 2022. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Elrond-GO is a go implementation for the Elrond Network protocol. Versions prior to 1.3.50 are subject to a processing issue where nodes are affected when trying to process a cross-shard relayed transaction with a smart contract deploy transaction data. The problem was a bad correlation between the transaction caches and the processing component. If the above-mentioned transaction was sent with more gas than required, the smart contract result (SCR transaction) that should have returned the leftover gas, would have been wrongly added to a cache that the processing unit did not consider. The node stopped notarizing metachain blocks. The fix was actually to extend the SCR transaction search in all other caches if it wasn't found in the correct (expected) sharded-cache. There are no known workarounds at this time. This issue has been patched in version 1.3.50.

Weakness: CWE-669

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-46173?

3 open source packages ship an affected version, including github.com/ElrondNetwork/elrond-go. It affects 1 product.

Package	Affected	Fixed in
`github.com/ElrondNetwork/elrond-go` Go	All versions	`1.3.50`
`github.com/ElrondNetwork/elrond-go` Go	All versions	`1.3.50`
`github.com/ElrondNetwork/elrond-go` Go	All versions	`1.3.50`

Products include Elrond Elrond Go.

How do I fix CVE-2022-46173?

Upgrade github.com/ElrondNetwork/elrond-go to 1.3.50 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-2022-46173 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-46173 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Sources

Also known as GHSA-p228-4mrh-ww7r, GO-2022-1200.