GHSA-mw3q-r9wh-h2ff is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-248 vulnerability in nimiq-primitives. O3 Security confirms whether GHSA-mw3q-r9wh-h2ff is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
nimiq-primitives: Panic DoS in trie chunk processing via ROOT-keyed item
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- 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 GHSA-mw3q-r9wh-h2ff.
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.
How urgent is this, really
GHSA-mw3q-r9wh-h2ff plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 358,265 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
nimiq-primitivesReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects crates.io packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Impact
A remote, unauthenticated denial-of-service vulnerability in MerkleRadixTrie::put_chunk allows any state-sync peer to crash any node performing state synchronization (freshly joining nodes and recovering nodes).
A malicious peer can respond to a RequestChunk with a ResponseChunk::Chunk whose first TrieItem.key is the empty (ROOT) key. The chunk passes sorting, range, and Merkle-proof validation, but when put_raw tries to store a value at the root node, it calls TrieNode::put_value(...).unwrap(), which returns Err(RootCantHaveValue) and panics, aborting the node process. The panic fires on the first malicious chunk the victim commits; no rate limit or authentication gate caps the attack.
Impacted: any node running state sync against untrusted peers — this includes fresh nodes performing initial download and existing nodes recovering from data loss. Honest nodes never construct ROOT-keyed items, so non-syncing operation is unaffected.
Patches
See PR.
Workarounds
There is no safe in-process workaround: any peer serving state-sync data can trigger the crash and the code path is not guarded by a feature flag.
Resources
- Fix commit: (link to the merged PR commit, once merged)
- Affected code:
primitives/trie/src/trie.rs—put_chunk(around line 819) andput_raw(around line 351)
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🦀crates.io | nimiq-primitives | all versions | 1.5.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for nimiq-primitives. 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 nimiq-primitives to 1.5.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-mw3q-r9wh-h2ff 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-mw3q-r9wh-h2ff 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-mw3q-r9wh-h2ff. 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-mw3q-r9wh-h2ff in your dependencies?
O3 detects GHSA-mw3q-r9wh-h2ff across crates.io dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.