CVE-2021-21405

BLS Signature "Malleability"

HIGH
7.5
CVSS Score
Published: April 15, 2021 at 09:35 PM UTC
Updated: June 17, 2026 at 03:35 AM UTC
1 product affected across 1 vendorLotus

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Severity
HIGH7.5
Exploit prediction
EPSS 1.0%

Description

Lotus is an Implementation of the Filecoin protocol written in Go. BLS signature validation in lotus uses blst library method VerifyCompressed. This method accepts signatures in 2 forms: "serialized", and "compressed", meaning that BLS signatures can be provided as either of 2 unique byte arrays. Lotus block validation functions perform a uniqueness check on provided blocks. Two blocks are considered distinct if the CIDs of their blockheader do not match. The CID method for blockheader includes the BlockSig of the block. The result of these issues is that it would be possible to punish miners for valid blocks, as there are two different valid block CIDs available for each block, even though this must be unique. By switching from the go based `blst` bindings over to the bindings in `filecoin-ffi`, the code paths now ensure that all signatures are compressed by size and the way they are deserialized. This happened in https://github.com/filecoin-project/lotus/pull/5393.

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

v < 1.5.0
Affected range stops below 1.5.0, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement

Remediation

No guide yet

No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet. What the record does show:

CVSS

Attack Vector
NETWORK
Complexity
LOW
Privileges
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality
NONE
Integrity
HIGH
Availability
NONE
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusMODIFIED
CWE
CWE-347

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