VulnerabilityModified

CVE-2023-28431

This gas cost discrepancy was not accounted for in the `modexp` precompile, leading to possible denial of service attacks.

HIGH 7.5EPSS 0.87%

Does this matter?

High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.87%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.

Description

Frontier is an Ethereum compatibility layer for Substrate. Frontier's `modexp` precompile uses `num-bigint` crate under the hood. In the implementation prior to pull request 1017, the cases for modulus being even and modulus being odd are treated separately. Odd modulus uses the fast Montgomery multiplication, and even modulus uses the slow plain power algorithm. This gas cost discrepancy was not accounted for in the `modexp` precompile, leading to possible denial of service attacks. No fixes for `num-bigint` are currently available, and thus this issue is fixed in the short term by raising the gas costs for even modulus, and in the long term fixing it in `num-bigint` or switching to another modexp implementation. The short-term fix for Frontier is deployed at pull request 1017. There are no known workarounds aside from applying the fix.

CVSS 3.1: 7.5 HIGHCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS: 0.87% probability · 57th percentile
CISA KEV: Not listed
Weakness: CWE-682
Affected: parity/frontier
Source: security-advisories@github.com

References

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.