CVE-2021-41138CWE-20

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

Medium · published October 13, 2021

CVSS v3.1
5.3
EPSS
1%
Percentile
72.0
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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`.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
5.3 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.01383 · 72.0th percentile
Weakness
CWE-20 · Improper Input Validation
Published
2021-10-13T15:15Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 13 OCT 15:15Z
    Validity check for signed Frontier-specific extrinsic not called in block execution
    cvelistv5