GitHub Advisoryadvisory · crates.io

GHSA-mw3q-r9wh-h2ff nimiq-primitives: Panic DoS in trie chunk processing via ROOT-keyed item

HIGH Published 2026-05-21 Modified 2026-06-10 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