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How the CVE Works:
The vulnerability exists in Babylon’s consensus message handling for vote extensions. The code fails to properly validate the structure of incoming vote extensions before processing. An adversarial validator can craft a malformed vote extension message by populating it with non-existent Protocol Buffers (protobuf) tags. When this malicious message is broadcast, nodes attempt to unmarshal the data, but the large, invalid protobuf structure causes excessive memory allocation or computational strain during parsing. This flaw prevents the node from correctly forming or validating the subsequent block proposal. As the malicious vote extensions are included in the consensus process, all honest validators will reject the proposed block containing them, leading to a complete failure to finalize any new blocks and resulting in a chain halt.
Platform: Blockchain
Version: Pre-patch
Vulnerability: Consensus Halt
Severity: High
date: 2024-11-24
Prediction: Patch by 2025-01-15
What Undercode Say:
`cat /babylon/consensus/state.go | grep -A 10 -B 10 “VoteExtension”`
`protoc –decode_raw < malformed_vote_extension.bin`
`curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/babylonlabs-io/babylon/commits | jq ‘.[bash] | .commit.message’`
How Exploit:
Craft malformed vote extension with invalid protobuf tags and broadcast it via the validator’s signing process.
Protection from this CVE:
Update to patched version. Implement strict protobuf unmarshaling with tag validation and size limits.
Impact:
Network Halting. Block Production Ceases. Validator Slashing.
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Sources:
Reported By: github.com
Extra Source Hub:
Undercode
