CVE-2020-26241

high

Description

Go Ethereum, or "Geth", is the official Golang implementation of the Ethereum protocol. This is a Consensus vulnerability in Geth before version 1.9.17 which can be used to cause a chain-split where vulnerable nodes reject the canonical chain. Geth's pre-compiled dataCopy (at 0x00...04) contract did a shallow copy on invocation. An attacker could deploy a contract that writes X to an EVM memory region R, then calls 0x00..04 with R as an argument, then overwrites R to Y, and finally invokes the RETURNDATACOPY opcode. When this contract is invoked, a consensus-compliant node would push X on the EVM stack, whereas Geth would push Y. This is fixed in version 1.9.17.

References

https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/security/advisories/GHSA-69v6-xc2j-r2jf

https://blog.ethereum.org/2020/11/12/geth_security_release/

Details

Source: Mitre, NVD

Published: 2020-11-25

Updated: 2026-06-17

Risk Information

CVSS v2

Base Score: 5.5

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:P/A:P

Severity: Medium

CVSS v3

Base Score: 7.1

Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:L

Severity: High

EPSS

EPSS: 0.00208