Medium · published November 25, 2020
Go Ethereum, or "Geth", is the official Golang implementation of the Ethereum protocol. This is a Consensus vulnerability in Geth before version 1.9.17 which can be used to cause a chain-split where vulnerable nodes reject the canonical chain. Geth's pre-compiled dataCopy (at 0x00...04) contract did a shallow copy on invocation. An attacker could deploy a contract that writes X to an EVM memory region R, then calls 0x00..04 with R as an argument, then overwrites R to Y, and finally invokes the RETURNDATACOPY opcode. When this contract is invoked, a consensus-compliant node would push X on the EVM stack, whereas Geth would push Y. This is fixed in version 1.9.17.