1inch Hack

TOTAL LOST $5.0M
Medium Calldata underflow and resolver hijack ethereum

Summarize with AI

Affected Chain ethereum Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #425 By amount stolen
Auditors 1 Prior security audit

Incident Overview

1inch is the DeFi ecosystem building financial freedom for everyone

Incident Report

Protocol / Project 1inch
Date of Incident
Affected Chain(s) ethereum
Attack Technique Calldata underflow and resolver hijack
Classification Protocol Logic
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type DEX Aggregator
Smart Contract Language Solidity
Official Website 1inch.com
Protocol Twitter/X @1inch

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Price at Hack $0.2326
Market Cap at Hack $320.0M
% of Market Cap Stolen 1.56%
Token Categories
Decentralized Exchange (DEX) Token DeFi Wallet Ethereum Ecosystem AMM YZi Labs Portfolio Avalanche Ecosystem Solana Ecosystem

What the Attacker Needed to Succeed

Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.

Technical Knowledge Deep understanding of calldata underflow and resolver hijack and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with ethereum smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in 1inch's contract logic - root cause: protocol logic
Execution Speed Precise transaction ordering and timing to exploit the vulnerability within a single atomic block
Obfuscation Plan A strategy to launder and move stolen funds - typically through mixers, cross-chain bridges, or decentralized DEX swaps to resist tracing

What Auditors Should Check

Could this have been caught in audit? Likely — with a thorough Calldata underflow and resolver hijack audit checklist and test coverage
Audited by Audit Report 1 — still lost $5.0M. Prior audits don't guarantee safety, especially after post-audit code changes.

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to 1inch, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (March 2025).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Calldata underflow and resolver hijack are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Arithmetic Overflows Underflows attack class for patterns
  • Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs

Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.

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Security Audit History

Related Attack Classes

The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:

See all Arithmetic Overflows Underflows examples →

Sources & References

Learn to Prevent the Next 1inch

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