CVE-2021-41138

Validity check for signed Frontier-specific extrinsic not called in block execution

State
Published
Severity
5.3 Medium
Published
Oct 13, 2021
Updated
Aug 4, 2024
Reserved
Sep 15, 2021

Read the record on cve.org

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`.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.15.3 MediumCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:NGitHub_M

Weaknesses

  • CWE-20 Improper Input Validation

Affected Products

ProductVersions
frontierparitytech
  • < 146bb48Affected

References

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