Shallow copy bug in geth

Impact

This is a Consensus vulnerability, which can be used to cause a chain-split where vulnerable nodes reject the canonical chain.

Geth’s pre-compiled dataCopy (at 0x00...04) contract did a shallow copy on invocation. An attacker could deploy a contract that

• writes X to an EVM memory region R,
• calls 0x00..04 with R as an argument,
• overwrites R to Y,
• and finally invokes the RETURNDATACOPY opcode.

When this contract is invoked, a consensus-compliant node would push X on the EVM stack, whereas Geth would push Y.

Patches

No standalone patches have been made.

Workarounds

Upgrade to 1.9.17 or higher.

References

https://blog.ethereum.org/2020/11/12/geth_security_release/

For more information

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