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Denial of service in geth

Moderate severity GitHub Reviewed Published Nov 24, 2020 in ethereum/go-ethereum • Updated Feb 14, 2023

Package

gomod github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum (Go)

Affected versions

>= 1.9.16, < 1.9.18

Patched versions

1.9.18
gomod github.com/holiman/uint256 (Go)
>= 0.1.0, < 1.1.1
1.1.1

Description

Impact

Denial-of-service (crash) during block processing

Details

Affected versions suffer from a vulnerability which can be exploited through the MULMOD operation, by specifying a modulo of 0: mulmod(a,b,0), causing a panic in the underlying library.
The crash was in the uint256 library, where a buffer underflowed.

if `d == 0`, `dLen` remains `0`

and https://github.com/holiman/uint256/blob/4ce82e695c10ddad57215bdbeafb68b8c5df2c30/uint256.go#L451 will try to access index [-1].

The uint256 library was first merged in this commit, on 2020-06-08.
Exploiting this vulnerabilty would cause all vulnerable nodes to drop off the network.

The issue was brought to our attention through a bug report, showing a panic occurring on sync from genesis on the Ropsten network.

It was estimated that the least obvious way to fix this would be to merge the fix into uint256, make a new release of that library and then update the geth-dependency.

Patches

Upgrade to v1.9.18 or higher

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

References

@holiman holiman published to ethereum/go-ethereum Nov 24, 2020
Reviewed May 21, 2021
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Jun 29, 2021
Last updated Feb 14, 2023

Severity

Moderate
6.5
/ 10

CVSS base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
Low
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CVE ID

CVE-2020-26242

GHSA ID

GHSA-jm5c-rv3w-w83m

Source code

No known source code
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