VYPR
High severityNVD Advisory· Published Nov 14, 2023· Updated Aug 29, 2024

Crosslinking transaction attack in hyperledger/fabric

CVE-2023-46132

Description

Hyperledger Fabric is an open source permissioned distributed ledger framework. Combining two molecules to one another, called "cross-linking" results in a molecule with a chemical formula that is composed of all atoms of the original two molecules. In Fabric, one can take a block of transactions and cross-link the transactions in a way that alters the way the peers parse the transactions. If a first peer receives a block B and a second peer receives a block identical to B but with the transactions being cross-linked, the second peer will parse transactions in a different way and thus its world state will deviate from the first peer. Orderers or peers cannot detect that a block has its transactions cross-linked, because there is a vulnerability in the way Fabric hashes the transactions of blocks. It simply and naively concatenates them, which is insecure and lets an adversary craft a "cross-linked block" (block with cross-linked transactions) which alters the way peers process transactions. For example, it is possible to select a transaction and manipulate a peer to completely avoid processing it, without changing the computed hash of the block. Additional validations have been added in v2.2.14 and v2.5.5 to detect potential cross-linking issues before processing blocks. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

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Affected packages

Versions sourced from the GitHub Security Advisory.

PackageAffected versionsPatched versions
github.com/hyperledger/fabricGo
>= 1.0.0-alpha, < 2.2.142.2.14
github.com/hyperledger/fabricGo
>= 2.3.0, < 2.5.52.5.5

Affected products

5

Patches

Vulnerability mechanics

References

9

News mentions

0

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