WOOFi Swap Hack

Reported loss $8.8M
Arbitrum
Flash-loan-assisted sPMM price manipulation

What happened

On March 5, 2024, an attacker exploited WOOFi Swap's synthetic proactive market maker on Arbitrum. Flash-borrowed WOO and low available liquidity let the attacker force WOOFi's internal WOO price close to zero, acquire WOO at a negligible cost, and extract value through three rapid attack cycles.

Technical root cause

WOOFi's sPMM price calculation could push WOO's internal price far outside its intended range under a large trade. The fallback validation that would compare against Chainlink did not cover WOO, so the implausible price was accepted instead of reverting.

How it happened

The attacker borrowed WOO and other assets through flash-loan arrangements, sold WOO into WOOFi, and triggered an extreme internal WOO price adjustment. With the manipulated price near zero, the attacker swapped out roughly 10 million WOO for almost no cost, unwound the position, and repaid the loans. Repeating the sequence three times produced about $8.75 million in net profit after flash-loan repayment.

The affected sPMM pricing path normally uses oracle validation as a fallback. WOO was not covered by that Chainlink fallback, so the implausible internal price was accepted instead of reverting. WOOFi paused the Arbitrum Swap contracts shortly after detection; its other product contracts were unaffected.

Protocol details

Classification Oracle Manipulation / AMM Price Calculation
Protocol Type DEX
Implementation language Solidity
Protocol links Website @_WOOFi

Security review history

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