---
title: Vulnerability disclosure
sort_key: A
---

## About disclosures

In the software world, it is expected for security vulnerabilities to be immediately announced, thus giving operators an opportunity to take protective measure against attackers. 

Vulnerabilies can typically take two forms: 

1. Vulnerabilies that, if exploited, would harm the software operator. In the case of go-ethereum, examples would be:
    - A bug that would allow remote reading or writing of OS files, or 
    - Remote command execution, or
    - Bugs that would leak cryptographic keys  
2. Vulnerabilies that, if exploited, would harm the Ethereum mainnet. In the case of go-ethereum, examples would be: 
    - Consensus vulnerabilities, which would cause a chain split, 
    - Denial-of-service during block processing, whereby a malicious transaction could cause the geth-portion of the network to crash.  
    - Denial-of-service via p2p networking, whereby portions of the network could be made inaccessible due to crashes or resource consumption.

Historically, vulnerabilities in `geth` predominantly been of the second type, where the health of the network is a concern, rather than individual node operators. 

For vulnerabilities in category `2` above, we reserve the right to silently patch and ship fixes in new releases. 

### Why silent patches

In the case of Ethereum, it takes a lot of time (weeks, months) to get node operators to update even to a scheduled hard fork. 
If we were to highlight that a release contains important consensus or DoS fixes, there is always a risk of someone trying to beat 
node operators to the punch, and exploit the vulnerability. Delaying a potential attack 
sufficiently to make the majority of node operators immune may be worth the temporary loss of transparency.

The primary goal for the Geth team is the health of the Ethereum network as a whole, and the decision whether or not to publish details about a serious vulnerability boils down 
to minimizing the risk and/or impact of discovery and exploitation. 

At certain times, it's better to remain silent as shown by other projects 
too such as [Monero](https://www.getmonero.org/2017/05/17/disclosure-of-a-major-bug-in-cryptonote-based-currencies.html), 
[ZCash](https://electriccoin.co/blog/zcash-counterfeiting-vulnerability-successfully-remediated/) and 
[Bitcoin](https://www.coindesk.com/the-latest-bitcoin-bug-was-so-bad-developers-kept-its-full-details-a-secret).

### Public transparency

As of November 2020, our policy going forward is: 

- If we silently fix and ship a vulnerability in release `X`, then, 
- After 4-8 weeks, we will disclose that `X` contained a security-fix. 
- After an additional 4-8 weeks, we will publish the details about the vulnerability.

We hope that this provides sufficient balance between transparency versus the need for secrecy, and aids node operators and downstream projects
 in keeping up to date with what versions to run on their infrastructure.

In keeping with this policy, we have taken inspiration from [Solidity bug disclosure](https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/bugs.html) - see below.

## Disclosed vulnerabilities

In this folder, you can find a JSON-formatted list ([`vulnerabilities.json`](vulnerabilities.json)) of some of the known security-relevant vulnerabilities concerning `geth`. 

As of `geth` version `1.9.25`, geth has a built-in command to check whether it is affected by any publically disclosed vulnerability, using the command `geth version-check`. This command will fetch the latest json file (and the accompanying [signature-file](vulnerabilities.json.minisig), and cross-check the data against it's own version number.

The file itself is hosted in the Github repository, on the `gh-pages`-branch. 
The list was started in November 2020, and covers mainly `v1.9.7` and forward.

The JSON file of known vulnerabilities below is a list of objects, one for each vulnerability, with the following keys:

- `name` 
  - Unique name given to the vulnerability.
- `uid` 
  - Unique identifier of the vulnerability. Format `GETH-<year>-<sequential id>`
- `summary`
  - Short description of the vulnerability.
- `description`
  - Detailed description of the vulnerability.
- `links`
  - List of relevant URLs with more detailed information (optional).
- `introduced`
  - The first published Geth version that contained the vulnerability (optional).
- `fixed`
  - The first published Geth version that did not contain the vulnerability anymore.
- `published`
  - The date at which the vulnerability became known publicly (optional).
- `severity`
  - Severity of the vulnerability: `low`, `medium`, `high`, `critical`. 
  - Takes into account the severity of impact and likelihood of exploitation.
- `check`
  - This field contains a regular expression, which can be used against the reported `web3_clientVersion` of a node. If the check 
    matches, the node is with a high likelyhood affected by the vulnerability.
- `CVE`
  - The assigned `CVE` identifier, if available (optional)

### What about Github security advisories

We prefer to not rely on Github as the only/primary publishing protocol for security advisories, but 
we plan use the Github-advisory process as a second channel for disseminating vulnerability-information. 

Advisories published via Github can be accessed [here](https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/security/advisories?state=published).