OrbitLens
TL;DR More than half a year ago I discovered a vulnerability in Stellar DEX that allowed an attacker to buy micro-amounts of any asset at the 1:1 rate. With basic automation, potential attack profitability was up to 16,000 XLM per hour. The bug was fixed in Stellar Core v10, all funds are safe.
Bankers are always quite watchful on all aspects concerning
numbers rounding during money transfers. That’s the case when tiny things matter, especially when the financial institution processes millions of transactions daily.
This is the story about one small error in the Stellar Decentralized Exchange matching engine which could lead to the market panic and tradings halt.
Chapter 1.Traces
About nine months ago I was working on improvements in StellarExpert trades aggregation when I spotted a strange thing. Charts displayed occasional price spikes for some trading pairs, sometimes more than 1000%. My first thought was that those markets lack liquidity, which is a common issue for new assets. However, the same spikes were detected for top assets with tight orderbook. Weird, very-very weird…
When I dug through the database and checked the trading effects, I found that those price deviations were caused by “dust” trades with an extra-small trading amount, like 0.0000001 XLM. So I decided that was just a Horizon rounding error on the effect serialization step because the operations displayed prices close to the current market price and it happened only with extra-small amounts. Therefore all I need to normalize the price history chart was to exclude trades with the amount less than, say, 0.0000100 XLM from the aggregation pipeline.
Chapter 2. Suspicions
Next day I was fiddling with the minimum amount threshold for the trades to be included in the history stats when suddenly I discovered a pattern. “Dust” trades caused trades execution 1:1 despite the assets been trading and the original order price. Summing up accounts balances in the database showed that the trades actually happened at the 1:1 rate. Such behavior resulted in especially impressive OHLC price charts for BTC-anchored assets (NaoBTC, Papaya, VCBear). Fluctuations looked monstrous; candles showed ~99.995% sudden price drops from the regular market price.
That was a bug moreover, a bug in Stellar Core. So I sat and started composing a bug report for the SDF team. It looked like the rounding has been initially implemented in such fashion to prevent the market from bloating with such “dust leftover” offers.
Chapter 3.Threat
The issue didn’t look critical as anybody who was going to exploit that bug had to pay at least 0.0000100 XLM of transaction fees. Nobody sanely will spend 0.00001 XLM for fees to trade 0.0000001 CNY with a slightly better exchange rate. Even without fees, the earnings won’t cover the time needed to implement the automated exploit.
Then it struck me. What about more expensive assets? For example, assets anchored to BTC at that moment were trading around 37,000 XLM/BTC . One could bought 0.0000001 BTC for 0.0000101 XLM (0.0000100 XLM base fee + 0.0000001 XLM actually spent), or 0.27% of the market price! The best Bitcoin deal ever!
So far 0.0000001 BTC looks not so impressive, let’s see how we can
increase the potential attacker profit. After thinking for half an hour, I came with the following attack vector.
- Create 20 accounts and fund with, say, 120 XLM each.
- Implement a bot that submits a transaction with 100 ManageOffer operations for each account every 4 seconds (roughly 900*100 =90,000 operations per hour for each account).
- Rent cheap cloud server for ten dollars per month and launch the bot.
- Once in 10 minutes or so bot should sell all traded BTC at market price and send all profits to a master account.
- Repeat while there is at least one open offer. Then switch to another asset (BTC issued by another anchor, or, for example, ETH tokens).
The profitability of the attack:
(0.0037 0.0000101) * 20 * 90000 = 6641.82 XLM/hour
About 1,300 USD per hour considering the price at the moment of bug discovery. Not so bad, huh? On top of that, regular traders lose the corresponding amount of money minus fees every hour. Using 50 channel accounts instead of 20 could increase the profit of the potential attack up to 16,000 XLM per hour.
The worst thing of all is that the attack could last days even if the malicious activity is detected. You can’t just block an account on the public permissionless blockchain without a consensus of all validators, neither you can “turn off” trades on the decentralized exchange.
Chapter 4.Scrutiny
Once I made the calculations, it came to me that it can be a huge problem if someone with evil intentions discovers the vulnerability. Such an unstoppable attack on SDEX, the core Stellar mechanism, could lead to the massive FUD wave, not only halting on-chain trades but also resulting in panic XLM sales.
To tell the truth, I was so confused by my findings, that I composed and sent an email directly to Jed. I didn’t create an issue in the bug-tracker to prevent public disclosure. Only much later, I recollected that someone mentioned a dedicated email address for urgent security questions and bug bounty on Stellar Slack. A few minutes digging through the history, and here it is security@stellar.org .
The auto-responder said that
“You are receiving this message because Stellar.org uses HackerOne to receive security vulnerability reports. Before Stellar.org can review your vulnerability report, you must complete your submission on HackerOne.”
Thus I registered on HackerOne and submitted a report containing all vulnerability details and attack vector. Bartek commented that they are investigating the report, and Jed earlier responded that they were working on a fix for that. SDF team knew about the problem, so I relaxed and forgot about it.
However, it wasn’t the end of the story…
Chapter 5.Pursuit
Every decent detective novel requires at least one pursuit scene. You won’t be disappointed.
A few months later I was working out at the gym when suddenly I received the notification from Stellar Slack. It immediately caught my attention.