CVE-2024-24563Critical· 9.8▾ MidnightVyper negative array index bounds checks
▾ Midnight zone — Critical, or high with PoC / in-the-wild
impact 53.9 · likelihood 0.3 · exploitation 0
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Exploit-prediction probability, daily snapshots since Sep 12.
Disclosure to exploitation, from the record and what we observed since indexing it.
Disclosed via OSV
Last analysed / modified upstream
1.5%
Arrays can be keyed by a signed integer, while they are defined for unsigned integers only. The typechecker doesn't throw when spotting the usage of an int as an index for an array. Typically, negative integers are filtered out at runtime by the bounds checker, but small enough (i.e. large in magnitude, ex. -2**255 + 5) quantities combined with large enough arrays (at least 2**255 in length) can pass the bounds checker, resulting in unexpected behavior.
A contract search was performed, and no production contracts were found to be impacted.
The typechecker allows the usage of signed integers to be used as indexes to arrays. The vulnerability is present in different forms in all versions. Here is an example from 0.3.10:
https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/blob/c150fc49ee9375a930d177044559b83cb95f7963/vyper/semantics/types/subscriptable.py#L127-L137
As can be seen, the validation is performed against IntegerT.any().
If the array is sufficiently large, it can be indexed with a negative value:
arr: public(uint256[MAX_UINT256])
@external
def set(idx: int256, num: uint256):
self.arr[idx] = num
For signed integers, the 2's complement representation is used. Because the array was declared very large, the bounds checking will pass (negative values will simply be represented as very large numbers): https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/blob/a1fd228cb9936c3e4bbca6f3ee3fb4426ef45490/vyper/codegen/core.py#L534-L541
Patched in https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/pull/3817.
There are two potential vulnerability classes: unpredictable behavior and accessing inaccessible elements.
If it is possible to index an array with a negative integer without reverting, this is most likely not anticipated by the developer and such accesses can cause unpredictable behavior for the contract.
If a contract has an invariant in the form assert index < x where both index and x are signed integers, the developer might suppose that no elements on indexes y | y >= x are accessible. However, by using negative indexes this can be bypassed.
The contract search found no production contracts impacted by these two classes of issues.
vyper < 0.4.0Upgrade to a patched release:
vyper 0.4.0Connected by shared product, vendor, weakness, or advisory.
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