CVE-2025-54427 Polkadot Frontier contains missing `check_inherent` for `note_min_gas_price_target` inflates gas price
Block producers can manipulate gas price targets due to missing validation, causing inflated fees and denial of service for contract execution.
- 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-2025-54427?
CVE-2025-54427 is a medium-severity vulnerability in polkadot-evm frontier, published on 28 Jul 2025. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Polkadot Frontier is an Ethereum and EVM compatibility layer for Polkadot and Substrate. The extrinsic note_min_gas_price_target is an inherent extrinsic, meaning only the block producer can call it. To ensure correctness, the ProvideInherent trait should be implemented for each inherent, which includes the check_inherent call. This allows other nodes to verify if the input (in this case, the target value) is correct. However, prior to commit a754b3d, the check_inherent function has not been implemented for note_min_gas_price_target. This lets the block producer set the target value without verification. The target is then used to set the MinGasPrice, which has an upper and lower bound defined in the on_initialize hook. The block producer can set the target to the upper bound. Which also increases the upper and lower bounds for the next block. Over time, this could result in continuously raising the gas price, making contract execution too expensive and ineffective for users. An attacker could use this flaw to manipulate the gas price, potentially leading to significantly inflated transaction fees. Such manipulation could render contract execution prohibitively expensive for users, effectively resulting in a denial-of-service condition for the network. This is fixed in version a754b3d.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-54427?
How do I fix CVE-2025-54427?
No fix has been published for CVE-2025-54427 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Is CVE-2025-54427 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-54427 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as GHSA-r6rj-gmqh-cv94.