Researchers from Neodymium, a team specializing in security audits, noticed a critical vulnerability in Solana’s code base
In their latest blog post, crypto security researchers from Neodyme shared the design of an attack that may be profitable for “expensive” tokens integrated into Solana (SOL) ecosystem.
“One Lambo per hour”
According to the announcement shared on Neodymium’s social network and blog, its members noticed a bug in the Solana program library token loan agreement. As such, it has affected many Solana-based DeFi protocols.
Aggregated total value locked (TVL) at risk was over $2,600,000,000. The design of the hypothetical attack was quite simple: while depositing n fractional tokens, a user is able to withdraw n+1 fractional tokens.
With Solana’s native token, SOL, it won’t be economically efficient, as 1 Lamport (the smallest fraction of SOL, like Satoshi for Bitcoin, Wei for Ether, and Drop for XRP) is only worth around $ 0.000000220.
However, for Ether and Bitcoin, this scenario can be very profitable. With some technical upgrades, the attack can be executed about 300 times per second. In this case, losses can be dramatic:
We can include this transaction about 300 times per second, stealing $ 7,500 per second or about $ 27 million per hour (i.e. one Lamborghini Huracan per minute).
Bug fixed
In automated mode, this attack becomes profitable even for FTT and RAY tokens.
From December 2-4, Neodymium representatives contacted a number of Decentralized Financial Protocols (DeFis) on Solana, e.g. Larix, Solend, Tulip, Accumen, Soda, etc.
All teams fixed the bugs in their architecture. Yesterday, software engineer Jordan Audet-Sexton shared in GitHub that the issue is fixed in Solana’s main codebase as well.
