CVE-2025-54429 Polkadot Frontier's constructing smart contract can bypass precompile address bounding
Smart contracts can bypass access controls to call restricted precompiles due to incorrect address type identification in Polkadot Frontier.
- 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-2025-54429?
CVE-2025-54429 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. There are various account address types in Frontier, e.g. precompiled contracts, smart contracts, and externally owned accounts. Some EVM mechanisms should be unreachable by certain types of accounts for safety. For precompiles to be callable by smart contracts they must be explicitly configured as CallableByContract. If this configuration is absent, then the precompile should be unreachable via smart contract accounts. In commits prior to 0822030, the underlying implementation of CallableByContract which returned the AddressType was incorrect. It considered the contract address running under CREATE or CREATE2 to be AddressType::EOA rather than correctly as AddressType::Contract. The issue only affects users who use custom precompile implementations that utilize AddressType::EOA and AddressType::Contract. It's not directly exploitable in any of the predefined precompiles in Frontier. This is fixed in version 0822030.
Weakness: CWE-704
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-54429?
How do I fix CVE-2025-54429?
No fix has been published for CVE-2025-54429 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Is CVE-2025-54429 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-54429 in the wild and no public exploit code.