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GHSA-mw3q-r9wh-h2ff
No affected components available
Impact
A remote, unauthenticated denial-of-service vulnerability in MerkleRadixTrie::put_chunk allows any state-sync peer to crash any node performing state synchronization (freshly joining nodes and recovering nodes).
A malicious peer can respond to a RequestChunk with a ResponseChunk::Chunk whose first TrieItem.key is the empty (ROOT) key. The chunk passes sorting, range, and Merkle-proof validation, but when put_raw tries to store a value at the root node, it calls TrieNode::put_value(...).unwrap(), which returns Err(RootCantHaveValue) and panics, aborting the node process. The panic fires on the first malicious chunk the victim commits; no rate limit or authentication gate caps the attack.
Impacted: any node running state sync against untrusted peers — this includes fresh nodes performing initial download and existing nodes recovering from data loss. Honest nodes never construct ROOT-keyed items, so non-syncing operation is unaffected.
Patches
See PR.
Workarounds
There is no safe in-process workaround: any peer serving state-sync data can trigger the crash and the code path is not guarded by a feature flag.
Resources
- Fix commit: (link to the merged PR commit, once merged)
- Affected code:
primitives/trie/src/trie.rs—put_chunk(around line 819) andput_raw(around line 351)
The vulnerability can be exploited over the network without needing physical access. It is easy for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker does not need any special privileges or access rights. No user interaction is needed for the attacker to exploit this vulnerability. The impact is confined to the system where the vulnerability exists. There is a high impact on the availability of the system.
Exploitation attempts have been detected. Elevated vigilance and prompt remediation are advised.
The exploit probability is very low. The vulnerability is unlikely to be exploited in the next 30 days.
We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.
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