GHSA-4h98-2769-gh6h
HIGHOpenZeppelin Contracts vulnerable to ECDSA signature malleability
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
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 | 4.7.3 |
| 📦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 GHSA-4h98-2769-gh6h 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 GHSA-4h98-2769-gh6h 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 GHSA-4h98-2769-gh6h. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-4h98-2769-gh6h in your dependencies?
O3 detects GHSA-4h98-2769-gh6h across npm dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.