Incident Overview
Eminence Finance was exploited, resulting in a loss of 15,015,533 DAI.
Eminence Finance (EMN), an unreleased project by Yearn's Andre Cronje, was exploited. The smart contracts for Eminence were deployed without announcement and quickly discovered by the community. Users could deposit DAI into the smart contract and receive EMN in return.
EMN could be exchanged for five other tokens (eAAVE, eLINK, eYFI, eSNX, and eCRV). The attacker exploited these contracts by taking out a flash loan for 15 million DAI from Uniswap and used this to buy EMN. He then traded and burned half this EMN for eAAVE, driving up EMN’s price.
He then traded the rest of his EMN for DAI, traded his eAAVE to mint more EMN and then finally traded this EMN for DAI. This process was repeated three times to net the hacker 15,015,533 DAI. 8M DAI were returned back to the Yearn deployer.
Attacker Address:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x223034ed…171ca9
Malicious Transaction:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x35032531…9b8ad8
Returned DAI Transaction:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7bc97357…f4a4dd
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 Eminence, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (September 2020).
- Verify all logic paths related to Flashloan Price Oracle Attack / Flash Loan Attack are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Flash Loans Attacks attack class for patterns
- Audit oracle price feeds for manipulation risks - ensure time-weighted average prices (TWAPs) or multi-source aggregators are used, not spot prices
- 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.
Free TrialFunds Recovery
Recovered
$8.0M
Net Loss
7118223
Related Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
- 01
- 02
- 03
Learn to Prevent the Next Eminence
The Eminence hack is one of many attacks that skilled auditors are trained to detect before deployment. Master real exploit patterns and defense techniques with hands-on Web3 security training.