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Please note, this content is no longer actively maintained.

The content of the SWC registry has not been thoroughly updated since 2020. It is known to be incomplete and may contain errors as well as crucial omissions.

For currently maintained guidance on known Smart Contract vulnerabilities written primarily as guidance for security reviewers, please see the EEA EthTrust Security Levels specification. As well as the latest release version, an Editor's draft is available, that represents the latest work of the group developing the specification.

General guidance for developers on what to consider to ensure security, that is currently maintained, is also available through the Smart Contract Security Verification Standard (SCSVS).

Title

Lack of Proper Signature Verification

Relationships

CWE-345: Insufficient Verification of Data Authenticity

Description

It is a common pattern for smart contract systems to allow users to sign messages off-chain instead of directly requesting users to do an on-chain transaction because of the flexibility and increased transferability that this provides. Smart contract systems that process signed messages have to implement their own logic to recover the authenticity from the signed messages before they process them further. A limitation for such systems is that smart contracts can not directly interact with them because they can not sign messages. Some signature verification implementations attempt to solve this problem by assuming the validity of a signed message based on other methods that do not have this limitation. An example of such a method is to rely on msg.sender and assume that if a signed message originated from the sender address then it has also been created by the sender address. This can lead to vulnerabilities especially in scenarios where proxies can be used to relay transactions.

Remediation

It is not recommended to use alternate verification schemes that do not require proper signature verification through ecrecover().

References