Go Ethereum vulnerable to DoS via malicious p2p message

Impact

A vulnerable node can be forced to shutdown/crash using a specially crafted message.

During the peer-to-peer connection handshake, a shared secret key is computed. The implementation did not verify whether the EC public key provided by the remote party is a valid point on the secp256k1 curve. By simply sending an all-zero public key, a crash could be induced due to unexpected results from the handshake.

The issue was fixed by adding a curve point validity check in https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/commit/159fb1a1db551c544978dc16a5568a4730b4abf3

Patches

A fix has been included in geth version 1.14.13 and onwards.

Workarounds

Unfortunately, no workaround is available.

Credits

This issue was originally reported to Polygon Security by David Matosse (@iam-ned).