cve.bz

CVE-2023-28431

7.5 highEPSS 0.9%

High (7.5) in parity frontier. EPSS 0.9% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Frontier is an Ethereum compatibility layer for Substrate. Frontier's `modexp` precompile uses `num-bigint` crate under the hood. In the implementation prior to pull request 1017, the cases for modulus being even and modulus being odd are treated separately. Odd modulus uses the fast Montgomery multiplication, and even modulus uses the slow plain power algorithm. This gas cost discrepancy was not accounted for in the `modexp` precompile, leading to possible denial of service attacks. No fixes for `num-bigint` are currently available, and thus this issue is fixed in the short term by raising the gas costs for even modulus, and in the long term fixing it in `num-bigint` or switching to another modexp implementation. The short-term fix for Frontier is deployed at pull request 1017. There are no known workarounds aside from applying the fix.

Severity

CVSS 3.1

7.5 high
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS
0.9% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days; higher than 58% of CVEs (scores of 2026-10-31)
CWE
CWE-682
Published
Modified
Record from
the NVD, synced

Affected

Packages (OSV)

AdvisoryEcosystemPackageAffectedFixed in
GHSA-fcmm-54jp-7vf6crates.iopallet-evm-precompile-modexp<=1.0.0no fix published

References

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