Incident Overview
Sturdy Finance, an Ethereum-based lending platform, fell victim to an oracle manipulation exploit, losing 775,332 $USD.
Sturdy Finance was exploited through an oracle price manipulation attack. In a read-only reentrancy attack, the perpetrator managed to exploit the SturdyOracle contract and manipulate its pricing. They executed a single withdrawal transaction from the 'Sturdy_eth interest bearing WETH' contract.
The total funds lost due to the exploit amounted to 880,850 $USD. However, the attacker's profit was 442 $ETH, equating to around 775,332 $USD, while the remaining funds served as the flashloan commission. The illicitly gained profits were later moved through TornadoCash in multiple transactions.
Attacker Address:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x1E8419E7…31a08B
Malicious Contract:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x0B09c862…dFbeab
Malicious Transaction:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0xeb87ebc0…fb9eb7
Example of Funds Transfer Transaction:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x1702e647…2ee1a7
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 Sturdy Finance, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (June 2023).
- Verify all logic paths related to Oracle Issue are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Oracle Manipulation & Price Manipulation 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 TrialRelated Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
Learn to Prevent the Next Sturdy Finance
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