Resource exhaustion in Ethereum Go

CVE-2018-20421

Go Ethereum (aka geth) 1.8.19 allows attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) by rewriting the length of a dynamic array in memory, and then writing data to a single memory location with a large index number, as demonstrated by use of "assembly { mstore }" followed by a "c[0xC800000] = 0xFF" assignment.

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 7.5 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.015 (72.5th percentile), scored .

Low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, but still tracked. 73rd percentile — 72.5% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2018-20421: held from 0.015 to 0.015.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.015 · newest: 0.015 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

Public proof-of-concept exploits

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2018-20421?
CVE-2018-20421 is a high-severity vulnerability in Ethereum Go, classified under Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling. CVSS score: 7.5/10. Published 2018-12-24.
How severe is CVE-2018-20421?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.5 out of 10.
Is CVE-2018-20421 known to be exploited?
1 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.