Handle

defsec

Vulnerability details

Impact

Trades can happen at a bad price and lead to receiving fewer tokens than at a fair market price. The attacker's profit is the protocol's loss.

Proof of Concept

The NonUSTStrategy contract is missing slippage checks which can lead to being vulnerable to sandwich attacks.

A common attack in DeFi is the sandwich attack. Upon observing a trade of asset X for asset Y, an attacker frontruns the victim trade by also buying asset Y, lets the victim execute the trade, and then backruns (executes after) the victim by trading back the amount gained in the first trade. Intuitively, one uses the knowledge that someone’s going to buy an asset, and that this trade will increase its price, to make a profit. The attacker’s plan is to buy this asset cheap, let the victim buy at an increased price, and then sell the received amount again at a higher price afterwards.

See curvePool.exchange_underlying function : https://github.com/code-423n4/2022-01-sandclock/blob/main/sandclock/contracts/strategy/NonUSTStrategy.sol

    function _swapUnderlyingToUst() internal {
        uint256 underlyingBalance = _getUnderlyingBalance();
        if (underlyingBalance > 0) {
            // slither-disable-next-line unused-return
            curvePool.exchange_underlying(
                underlyingI,
                ustI,
                underlyingBalance,
                0
            );
        }
    }

According curve pool documentation the following parameter shows the minimum return amount of token on the return. On the contract, It is defined as 0.

https://curve.readthedocs.io/exchange-pools.html
_min_dy: Minimum amount of j to receive

Tools Used

Code Review

Recommended Mitigation Steps

Add minimum return amount checks. Accept a function parameter that can be chosen by the transaction sender, then check that the actually received amount is above this parameter.

Alternatively, check if it's feasible to send these transactions directly to a miner such that they are not visible in the public mempool.

code-423n4 / 2022-01-sandclock-findings