Denial of Service in Go-Ethereum

Description

A design flaw in all versions of Go-Ethereum allows an attacker node to send 5120 pending transactions of a high gas price from one account that all fully spend the full balance of the account to a victim Geth node, which can purge all of pending transactions in a victim node's memory pool and then occupy the memory pool to prevent new transactions from entering the pool, resulting in a denial of service (DoS).

Basic information

Type
reviewed
Severity
high
Advisory on GitHub
Open advisory ↗
Repository advisory
Source code
Browse source ↗
Published (advisory)
2022-03-05 00:00:46 UTC
Updated
2023-02-03 05:06:23 UTC
GitHub reviewed
2022-03-09 19:20:00 UTC
NVD published
2022-03-04 12:15:00 UTC

EPSS Score

Score Percentile
0.53% 66.53%

CVSS Scores

Base score Version Severity Vector
7.5 3.1
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H Click to expand
Attack vector (AV:N)
Could be attacked over the internet or any normal routed network—not just someone sitting at the machine.
Attack complexity (AC:L)
Once they can reach the bug, pulling it off is straightforward—no weird race conditions or rare setup.
Privileges required (PR:N)
No account or special rights needed—anonymous or random user is enough.
User interaction (UI:N)
Nobody has to click “OK” or open a trap file; it can work without a victim helping.
Scope (S:U)
Damage stays in the same “trust bubble” as the broken component—no big spill into unrelated systems.
Confidentiality (C:N)
Doesn’t really leak secrets in a meaningful way.
Integrity (I:N)
Data isn’t meaningfully altered or forged.
Availability (A:H)
Could take the service down hard or make it unusable for people who depend on it.

Identifiers

CWEs

CWE id Name
CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Affected packages (1)

Vulnerable version ranges and first patched releases as published by GitHub.

Ecosystem Package Vulnerable range First patched Vulnerable functions
go github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum <= 1.10.16

References

cvelogic Threat Intelligence