CVE-2018-15890

An issue was discovered in EthereumJ 1.8.2. There is Unsafe Deserialization in ois.readObject in mine/Ethash.java and decoder.readObject in crypto/ECKey.java. When a node syncs and mines a new block, arbitrary OS commands can be run on the server.

Weakness

The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently ensuring that the resulting data will be valid.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Make fields transient to protect them from deserialization.
• An attempt to serialize and then deserialize a class containing transient fields will result in NULLs where the transient data should be. This is an excellent way to prevent time, environment-based, or sensitive variables from being carried over and used improperly.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/586.html

References

• https://github.com/ethereum/ethereumj
• https://github.com/ethereum/ethereumj/issues/1161
• https://github.com/frohoff/ysoserial/
• https://github.com/ethereum/ethereumj
• https://github.com/ethereum/ethereumj/issues/1161
• https://github.com/frohoff/ysoserial/