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Backdoor slips into popular code library, drains ~$155k from digital wallets (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Socket, a security firm that helps detect supply-chain attacks, said the back door is “believed to be the result of a social engineering/phishing attack targeting maintainers of the official Web3.js open source library maintained by Solana.”

That's super interesting. From the sound of it, the Maintainers must have been targeted to force a malicious Pull Request to be accepted. That article showed some of the code from the commit. I am not a Solana developer but understood enough to know what it was doing and that no maintainer should have approved it willingly.

I wonder if those maintainers will end up having any liability for the hack.

[–] wicked 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Earlier today, a publish-access account was compromised for @solana/web3.js, a JavaScript library that is commonly used by Solana dapps. This allowed an attacker to publish unauthorized and malicious packages that were modified, allowing them to steal private key material and drain funds from dapps, like bots, that handle private keys directly. This issue should not affect non-custodial wallets, as they generally do not expose private keys during transactions. This is not an issue with the Solana protocol itself, but with a specific JavaScript client library and only appears to affect projects that directly handle private keys and that updated within the window of 3:20pm UTC and 8:25pm UTC on Tuesday, December 2, 2024.

These two unauthorized versions (1.95.6 and 1.95.7) were caught within hours and have since been unpublished.

We are asking all Solana app developers to upgrade to version 1.95.8. Developers pinned to latest should also upgrade to 1.95.8.

Developers that suspect they might be compromised should rotate any suspect authority keys, including multisigs, program authorities, server keypairs, and so on.

https://github.com/solana-labs/solana-web3.js/releases/tag/v1.95.8

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

If your protocol has the tendency to expose its private key, that seems like a protocol issue to me

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

I wonder if those maintainers will end up having any liability for the hack.

They're a crypto company. I'll give you three guesses