Use of transfer() might render ETH impossible to withdraw because after istanbul hardfork, there is an increase in the gas cost of the SLOAD operation and therefore breaks some existing smart contracts.Those contracts will break because their fallback functions used to consume less than 2300 gas, and they’ll now consume more, since 2300 the amount of gas a contract’s fallback function receives if it’s called via Solidity’s transfer() or send() methods. Any smart contract that uses transfer() or send() is taking a hard dependency on gas costs by forwarding a fixed amount of gas: 2300.
loki-sama
commented
2 years ago
Handle
JMukesh
Vulnerability details
Impact
Use of transfer() might render ETH impossible to withdraw because after istanbul hardfork, there is an increase in the gas cost of the SLOAD operation and therefore breaks some existing smart contracts.Those contracts will break because their fallback functions used to consume less than 2300 gas, and they’ll now consume more, since 2300 the amount of gas a contract’s fallback function receives if it’s called via Solidity’s transfer() or send() methods. Any smart contract that uses transfer() or send() is taking a hard dependency on gas costs by forwarding a fixed amount of gas: 2300.
Proof of Concept
https://github.com/code-423n4/2021-12-amun/blob/98f6e2ff91f5fcebc0489f5871183566feaec307/contracts/basket/contracts/singleJoinExit/EthSingleTokenJoin.sol#L37
https://github.com/code-423n4/2021-12-amun/blob/98f6e2ff91f5fcebc0489f5871183566feaec307/contracts/basket/contracts/singleJoinExit/EthSingleTokenJoinV2.sol#L37
https://github.com/code-423n4/2021-12-amun/blob/98f6e2ff91f5fcebc0489f5871183566feaec307/contracts/basket/contracts/singleJoinExit/SingleNativeTokenExitV2.sol#L121
https://github.com/code-423n4/2021-12-amun/blob/98f6e2ff91f5fcebc0489f5871183566feaec307/contracts/basket/contracts/singleJoinExit/SingleNativeTokenExit.sol#L93
Tools Used
manual review
Recommended Mitigation Steps
use call() instead of transfer()