CVE-2022-35961
HIGHECDSA signature malleability in OpenZeppelin Contracts
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
Blast Radius
@openzeppelin/contracts📦@openzeppelin/contracts-upgradeableReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects npm packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
OpenZeppelin Contracts is a library for secure smart contract development. 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. The issue has been patched in 4.7.3.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | @openzeppelin/contracts | ≥ 4.1.0&&< 4.7.3 | 4.7.3 |
| 📦npm | @openzeppelin/contracts-upgradeable | ≥ 4.1.0&&< 4.7.3 | 4.7.3 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for @openzeppelin/contracts. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
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.
How O3 protects you
O3 pinpoints whether CVE-2022-35961 is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to CVE-2022-35961. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2022-35961 in your dependencies?
O3 detects CVE-2022-35961 across npm dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.