CVE-2023-34451
Not exposing the transaction submission RPC's would mitigate the probability of a successful attack, as the attacker would then have to create a modified (byzantine) full node to be able to perform the attack via p2p.
Does this matter?
High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.90%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.
Description
CometBFT is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) middleware that takes a state transition machine and replicates it on many machines. The mempool maintains two data structures to keep track of outstanding transactions: a list and a map. These two data structures are supposed to be in sync all the time in the sense that the map tracks the index (if any) of the transaction in the list. In `v0.37.0`, and `v0.37.1`, as well as in `v0.34.28`, and all previous releases of the CometBFT repo2, it is possible to have them out of sync. When this happens, the list may contain several copies of the same transaction. Because the map tracks a single index, it is then no longer possible to remove all the copies of the transaction from the list. This happens even if the duplicated transaction is later committed in a block. The only way to remove the transaction is by restarting the node. The above problem can be repeated on and on until a sizable number of transactions are stuck in the mempool, in order to try to bring down the target node. The problem is fixed in releases `v0.34.29` and `v0.37.2`. Some workarounds are available. Increasing the value of `cache_size` in `config.toml` makes it very difficult to effectively attack a full node. Not exposing the transaction submission RPC's would mitigate the probability of a successful attack, as the attacker would then have to create a modified (byzantine) full node to be able to perform the attack via p2p.
- CVSS 3.1
- 8.2 HIGHCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H
- EPSS
- 0.90% probability · 59th percentile
- Public exploits
- None in Exploit-DB
- CISA KEV
- Not listed
- Weakness
- CWE-401
- Affected
- cometbft/cometbft
- Source
- security-advisories@github.com
EPSS 0.9% since 26 October 2026; no change recorded yet. Points are recorded when the score first appears and whenever it moves by a percentage point or more.
References
- https://github.com/cometbft/cometbft/pull/890Exploit, Issue Tracking, Patch
- https://github.com/cometbft/cometbft/security/advisories/GHSA-w24w-wp77-qffmExploit, Mitigation, Vendor Advisory
- https://github.com/tendermint/tendermint/pull/2778Issue Tracking, Patch
- https://github.com/cometbft/cometbft/pull/890Exploit, Issue Tracking, Patch
- https://github.com/cometbft/cometbft/security/advisories/GHSA-w24w-wp77-qffmExploit, Mitigation, Vendor Advisory
- https://github.com/tendermint/tendermint/pull/2778Issue Tracking, Patch
Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.