Cyber Resilience

CVE-2021-41272

High

Published: 13 December 2021

Published
13 December 2021
Modified
21 November 2024
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score v3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0037 59.1th percentile
Risk Priority 15 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

CVE-2021-41272 is a high-severity Incorrect Conversion between Numeric Types (CWE-681) vulnerability in Linuxfoundation Besu. Its CVSS base score is 7.5 (High).

Operationally, ranked in the top 40.9% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability details

Besu is an Ethereum client written in Java. Starting in version 21.10.0, changes in the implementation of the SHL, SHR, and SAR operations resulted in the introduction of a signed type coercion error in values that represent negative values for…

more

32 bit signed integers. Smart contracts that ask for shifts between approximately 2 billion and 4 billion bits (nonsensical but valid values for the operation) will fail to execute and hence fail to validate. In networks where vulnerable versions are mining with other clients or non-vulnerable versions this will result in a fork and the relevant transactions will not be included in the fork. In networks where vulnerable versions are not mining (such as Rinkeby) no fork will result and the validator nodes will stop accepting blocks. In networks where only vulnerable versions are mining the relevant transaction will not be included in any blocks. When the network adds a non-vulnerable version the network will act as in the first case. Besu 21.10.2 contains a patch for this issue. Besu 21.7.4 is not vulnerable and clients can roll back to that version. There is a workaround available: Once a transaction with the relevant shift operations is included in the canonical chain, the only remediation is to make sure all nodes are on non-vulnerable versions.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.

Affected Assets

linuxfoundation
besu
21.10.0, 21.10.1

Mitigating Controls

No mitigating controls mapped yet. The per-CVE control annotator has not reached this CVE.

References