CVE-2022-35961 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.9) CWE-354 vulnerability in @openzeppelin/contracts. A fix is available for @openzeppelin/contracts — see the affected versions and patch details below.
ECDSA signature malleability in OpenZeppelin Contracts
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2022-35961.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
@openzeppelin/contractsnpm@openzeppelin/contracts-upgradeablenpmDescription
Impact
The functions ECDSA.recover and ECDSA.tryRecover are vulnerable to a kind of signature malleability due to accepting EIP-2098 compact signatures in addition to the traditional 65 byte signature format. This is only an issue for the functions that take a single bytes argument, and not the functions that take r, v, s or r, vs as separate arguments.
The potentially affected contracts are those that implement signature reuse or replay protection by marking the signature itself as used rather than the signed message or a nonce included in it. A user may take a signature that has already been submitted, submit it again in a different form, and bypass this protection.
Patches
The issue has been patched in 4.7.3.
For more information
If you have any questions or comments about this advisory, or need assistance deploying a fix, email us at [email protected].
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | @openzeppelin/contracts | ≥ 4.1.0&&< 4.7.3 | 4.7.3npm install @openzeppelin/contracts@4.7.3 |
| 📦npm | @openzeppelin/contracts-upgradeable | ≥ 4.1.0&&< 4.7.3 | 4.7.3npm install @openzeppelin/contracts-upgradeable@4.7.3 |
Affected Products
contractsopenzeppelincontracts upgradeableopenzeppelinDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for @openzeppelin/contracts, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update @openzeppelin/contracts to 4.7.3 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2022-35961 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2022-35961 in your dependencies?
Find it across npm, including transitive dependencies.