Incident Overview
The transaction behind the attack:
https://bscscan.com/tx/0xd02e444d…5f479b
The attacker's address:
https://bscscan.com/address/0x74834611…fc5089
The attack was made possible by the public disclosure of a privileged function, which is subsequently used to set the trustedForwarder and further hijack the Crosswise MasterChef owner permission.
The attacker:
- called setTrustedForwarder() function to change trustedForwarder
- transferred the ownership
- swapped 0.01 WBNB to 3.71 CRSS through CrosswiseRouter
- deposited 1 CROSS to Crosswise MasterChef
- set strategy to the new one under the hacker's control
- withdrew 692K CRSS from the MasterChef
- swapped 692K CRSS to 547 WBNB
Stolen funds were deposited into the Tornado Cash proxy:
https://explorer.bitquery.io/bsc/txs/calls?caller=0x74834611…fc5089&contract=0x0d5550d5…859b17
Incident Report
Protocol Information
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.
What Auditors Should Check
If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Crosswise, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (January 2022).
- Verify all logic paths related to Other are guarded by proper access controls and input validation
- 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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