Incident Overview
Lodestar protocol was exploited via price feed oracle vulnerability. plvGLP price was manipulated which led to the protocol liquidity draining.
Lodestar Finance is a borrowing and lending protocol, based on the Compound fork, initially built and launched on the Arbitrum network. Lodestar aims to bring the critical DeFi primitive of decentralized money markets to Arbitrum communities. The protocol was exploited by manipulating the plvGLP oracle price using flashloans to create a large plvGLP collateral position.
The attacker increased the plvGLP/GLP rate and created the ability to change the price immediately, which was then compounded through the loops and led to significant borrowing ability. The main vulnerability that allowed such exploit flow was in GLPOracle price logic.
Attacker contract:
https://arbiscan.io/address/0x7596ACad…C53508
Attacker address:
https://arbiscan.io/address/0xc29d9438…9e2b5c
Exploit TX:
https://arbiscan.io/tx/0xc523c630…004e8c
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 Lodestar Finance, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (December 2022).
- Verify all logic paths related to Flash Loan Attack are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Flash Loans Attacks 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.
Free TrialSecurity Audit History
- Audit Report 1 Report
Related Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
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