CVE-2022-39242 — Frontier is an Ethereum compatibility layer for Substrate

Frontier is an Ethereum compatibility layer for Substrate. Prior to commit d3beddc6911a559a3ecc9b3f08e153dbe37a8658, the worst case weight was always accounted as the block weight for all cases. In case of large EVM gas refunds, this can lead to block spamming attacks -- the adve

01What is this vulnerability?

Frontier is an Ethereum compatibility layer for Substrate. Prior to commit d3beddc6911a559a3ecc9b3f08e153dbe37a8658, the worst case weight was always accounted as the block weight for all cases. In case of large EVM gas refunds, this can lead to block spamming attacks -- the adversary can construct blocks with transactions that have large amount of refunds or unused gases with reverts, and as a…

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
paritytech	frontier	< commit d3beddc6911a559a3ecc9b3f08e153dbe37a8658

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2022-09-24T01:25:09.000Z
• Last modified: 2025-04-23T16:55:41.124Z

09References

• github.com — https://github.com/paritytech/frontier/security/advisories/GHSA-v57h-6hmh-g2p4
• github.com — https://github.com/paritytech/frontier/pull/851