Vulnerability where a program's on-chain state becomes internally contradictory, often due to partial updates, missing account reloading after CPI, or race conditions between instructions. For example, a lending protocol's collateral ratio may become stale if account data is not refreshed after a CPI that modifies token balances.
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Vulnerability where a program's on-chain state becomes internally contradictory, often due to partial updates, missing account reloading after CPI, or race conditions between instructions. For example, a lending protocol's collateral ratio may become stale if account data is not refreshed after a CPI that modifies token balances.
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State Inconsistency (state-inconsistency) Category: Security Definition: Vulnerability where a program's on-chain state becomes internally contradictory, often due to partial updates, missing account reloading after CPI, or race conditions between instructions. For example, a lending protocol's collateral ratio may become stale if account data is not refreshed after a CPI that modifies token balances. Related: Account Reloading Attack, Cross-Program Invocation (CPI), Integer Overflow / Underflow
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A vulnerability in Anchor programs where a program reads an account's data before making a CPI call, the CPI modifies that account's lamports or data, but the program continues using the stale pre-CPI snapshot instead of reloading the account from the runtime. In Anchor, after a CPI the account reference still holds the pre-call data unless account.reload() is explicitly called, meaning balance checks, state assertions, or further computation can operate on incorrect values. Attackers can exploit this to pass checks using an initial account state that the CPI subsequently invalidates.
A mechanism for one program to call another program's instructions during execution. CPIs enable composability—e.g., a DeFi program can call the Token Program to transfer tokens. CPI depth is limited to 4 levels. The caller passes accounts and instruction data, and the callee runs with the same transaction context.
A class of arithmetic vulnerabilities where an integer computation produces a result outside the bounds of its fixed-width type, wrapping around silently in Rust's release builds (since Rust panics on overflow only in debug mode), yielding an incorrect value that can corrupt token balances, borrow limits, or access control counters. For example, subtracting a larger u64 from a smaller one wraps to near u64::MAX (~1.8 × 10^19), which could be interpreted as an enormous balance. Solana programs must use Rust's checked_add, checked_sub, checked_mul, and checked_div methods (or the saturating_* / wrapping_* variants with deliberate intent) on all financial arithmetic to eliminate this class of bugs.
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A vulnerability in Anchor programs where a program reads an account's data before making a CPI call, the CPI modifies that account's lamports or data, but the program continues using the stale pre-CPI snapshot instead of reloading the account from the runtime. In Anchor, after a CPI the account reference still holds the pre-call data unless account.reload() is explicitly called, meaning balance checks, state assertions, or further computation can operate on incorrect values. Attackers can exploit this to pass checks using an initial account state that the CPI subsequently invalidates.
A mechanism for one program to call another program's instructions during execution. CPIs enable composability—e.g., a DeFi program can call the Token Program to transfer tokens. CPI depth is limited to 4 levels. The caller passes accounts and instruction data, and the callee runs with the same transaction context.
A class of arithmetic vulnerabilities where an integer computation produces a result outside the bounds of its fixed-width type, wrapping around silently in Rust's release builds (since Rust panics on overflow only in debug mode), yielding an incorrect value that can corrupt token balances, borrow limits, or access control counters. For example, subtracting a larger u64 from a smaller one wraps to near u64::MAX (~1.8 × 10^19), which could be interpreted as an enormous balance. Solana programs must use Rust's checked_add, checked_sub, checked_mul, and checked_div methods (or the saturating_* / wrapping_* variants with deliberate intent) on all financial arithmetic to eliminate this class of bugs.
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A vulnerability where a program accepts an account in a privileged role (e.g., admin, authority, payer) without verifying that the account actually signed the transaction, allowing any caller to impersonate that authority by simply passing the target pubkey as an instruction account. In native Solana programs, the check requires asserting account.is_signer == true; in Anchor, the Signer<'info> type enforces this automatically. Exploitation lets an attacker bypass all access control gated on authority equality checks, making it one of the most critical and commonly audited vulnerabilities in Solana programs.
A vulnerability where a program deserializes and trusts account data without first confirming that the account is owned by the expected program, allowing an attacker to substitute a maliciously crafted account owned by a different program whose byte layout happens to satisfy the deserialization. On Solana, every account stores a 32-byte owner field set to the program that created it; native programs must assert account.owner == &expected_program_id, while Anchor's Account<'info, T> wrapper performs this check automatically. Failure to validate ownership can lead to complete auth bypass if an attacker can construct a fake account whose data parses into a struct with elevated privileges.
A vulnerability where a program accepts an arbitrary program account from the caller and invokes it via Cross-Program Invocation (CPI) without verifying it matches a known, trusted program ID, effectively letting an attacker substitute a malicious program that executes under the victim program's authority or manipulates accounts the victim program passes to it. A common pattern is accepting a token_program account without checking it equals spl_token::ID, so the attacker passes a lookalike program that records or drains account data. Prevention requires hard-coding or explicitly checking the program ID before every CPI call.
A vulnerability where a program derives a PDA internally but accepts an externally supplied account as that PDA without re-deriving and comparing the address, allowing an attacker to pass a different PDA (derived from attacker-controlled seeds) that the program will treat as legitimate. Because PDAs are deterministic, the only way to guarantee account identity is to call Pubkey::find_program_address (or equivalent) with the expected seeds inside the program and assert the result equals the supplied key. Anchor's seeds and bump constraints on the Account type automate this re-derivation and equality check.