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go-f3 Vulnerable to Cached Justification Verification Bypass

Moderate severity GitHub Reviewed Published Sep 29, 2025 in filecoin-project/go-f3 • Updated Sep 30, 2025

Package

gomod github.com/filecoin-project/go-f3 (Go)

Affected versions

< 0.8.9

Patched versions

0.8.9

Description

Description

A vulnerability exists in go-f3's justification verification caching mechanism where verification results are cached without properly considering the context of the message. An attacker can bypass justification verification by:

  1. First submitting a valid message with a correct justification
  2. Then reusing the same cached justification in contexts where it would normally be invalid

This occurs because the cached verification does not properly validate the relationship between the justification and the specific message context it's being used with.

Impact

  • Potential consensus integrity issues through invalid justification acceptance
  • Could affect network liveness if exploited systematically
  • May allow malicious actors to influence consensus decisions with invalid justifications
  • Requires significant power (350+ TiB due to power table rounding) to meaningfully exploit
  • It would also be difficult to exploit in a synchronised fashion, such that >1/3 of the network goes down at one time. This isn't a one-msg panic, where you can spam it and bring everyone down, because every node will have a different amount of memory andmany SPs also run redundant lotus nodes.

Patches

The fix was merged and released with go-f3 0.8.9. All node software (Lotus, Forest, Venus) are using a patched version of go-f3 with their updates for the nv27 network upgrade.

Workarounds

The are no immediate workarounds available. Nodes should upgrade to the patched version, which they will have done if participating in nv27 on Filecoin mainnet.

Credits

The bug was reported by @lgprbs via our bug bounty program. Thank you for the contributions.

References

@parthshah1 parthshah1 published to filecoin-project/go-f3 Sep 29, 2025
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Sep 29, 2025
Reviewed Sep 29, 2025
Published by the National Vulnerability Database Sep 29, 2025
Last updated Sep 30, 2025

Severity

Moderate

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
High
Privileges required
Low
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
High
Availability
Low

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:L

EPSS score

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

This score estimates the probability of this vulnerability being exploited within the next 30 days. Data provided by FIRST.
(12th percentile)

Weaknesses

Authentication Bypass by Primary Weakness

The authentication algorithm is sound, but the implemented mechanism can be bypassed as the result of a separate weakness that is primary to the authentication error. Learn more on MITRE.

CVE ID

CVE-2025-59941

GHSA ID

GHSA-7pq9-rf9p-wcrf

Credits

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