CVE-2021-41138

Vulnerability 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`.

CVSS Score

Affected Products

Related Weaknesses (CWE)

References

• https://github.com/paritytech/frontier/commit/146bb48849e5393004be5c88beefe76fdfPatchThird Party Advisory
• https://github.com/paritytech/frontier/pull/497PatchThird Party Advisory
• https://github.com/paritytech/frontier/security/advisories/GHSA-vj62-g63v-f8mfPatchThird Party Advisory
• https://github.com/paritytech/frontier/commit/146bb48849e5393004be5c88beefe76fdfPatchThird Party Advisory
• https://github.com/paritytech/frontier/pull/497PatchThird Party Advisory
• https://github.com/paritytech/frontier/security/advisories/GHSA-vj62-g63v-f8mfPatchThird Party Advisory