DeltaPrime Hack

Reported loss $1.0M
Arbitrum
Ownership Takeover

What happened

On July 23, 2024, an attacker took over 13 DeltaPrime Prime Accounts on Arbitrum and withdrew about $1 million of user collateral. DeltaPrime traced the breach to a misconfiguration in its DiamondBeaconProxy setup: an initialization method that should have been removed after deployment was still reachable from Prime Accounts, and its re-initialization guard read a different storage slot from the one that stores the account owner. That let the attacker re-initialize accounts and set himself as owner.

After negotiation the attacker returned about $900,000 and kept the remaining roughly $100,000 as a bounty, which DeltaPrime covered from its stability pool so affected users were made whole. On July 24, AstraSec reported a similar but separate ownership bug in DeltaPrime's account-creation contract that was fixed before anyone exploited it.

How it happened

  1. Each Prime Account is a DiamondBeaconProxy, so calls it cannot handle itself are routed to shared implementation facets, including the DiamondBeacon init() method left accessible after deployment.
  2. init() checked an _initialized flag in the DiamondBeacon storage slot (0xc8fcad8d...c131c), not in the Prime Account storage slot (0x8d5bb42e...960a) where the account owner lives, so the "already initialized" check passed on live accounts.
  3. The attacker called it on 13 accounts and wrote his own address as owner.
  4. Solvency checks and withdrawal guards still applied to the hijacked accounts, so the attacker unwound positions and repaid each account's pool loans before withdrawing the remaining collateral, about $1M in total.

Protocol details

Classification Protocol Logic / Access Control
Protocol Type Leveraged Farming
Implementation language Solidity
Protocol links Website @DeltaPrimeDefi

Security review history

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