CVE-2021-41138

MEDIUM

Frontier - Privilege Escalation

Title source: llm
STIX 2.1

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`.

References (3)

Core 3

Scores

CVSS v3 5.3
EPSS 0.0057
EPSS Percentile 68.9%
Attack Vector NETWORK
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N

Details

CWE
CWE-20
Status published
Products (2)
crates.io/pallet-ethereum 0crates.io
parity/frontier 2021-09-30 - 2021-10-13
Published Oct 13, 2021
Tracked Since Feb 18, 2026