GitHub Advisoryadvisory · crates.io
GHSA-mw3q-r9wh-h2ff nimiq-primitives: Panic DoS in trie chunk processing via ROOT-keyed item
HIGH
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2026-46545
- Ecosystem
- crates.io
- Packages
- nimiq-primitives
- Severity
- High
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Weaknesses
- CWE-248
- Reviewed
- 2026-05-21
Affected packages
• crates.io nimiq-primitives: < 1.5.0 → fixed in 1.5.0
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) and `put_raw` (around line 351)
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2026-46545 Nimiq is a Rust implementation of the Nimiq Proof-of-Stake protocol based on the Albatross consensus algorithm. vulnerability
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-248 Uncaught Exception weakness
References
- https://github.com/nimiq/core-rs-albatross/security/advisories/GHSA-mw3q-r9wh-h2ff web
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-46545 advisory
- https://github.com/nimiq/core-rs-albatross/pull/3762 web
- https://github.com/nimiq/core-rs-albatross/commit/0fb8766adea91e038af00e635a6eb92756e50172 web
- https://github.com/nimiq/core-rs-albatross package
- https://github.com/nimiq/core-rs-albatross/releases/tag/v1.5.0 web