Hyperledger Fabric is an open source permissioned distributed ledger framework. Combining two molecules to one another, called "cross-linking" results in a molecule with a chemical formula that is composed of all atoms of the original two molecules. In Fabric, one can take a block of transactions and cross-link the transactions in a way that alters the way the peers parse the transactions. If a first peer receives a block B and a second peer receives a block identical to B but with the transactions being cross-linked, the second peer will parse transactions in a different way and thus its world state will deviate from the first peer. Orderers or peers cannot detect that a block has its transactions cross-linked, because there is a vulnerability in the way Fabric hashes the transactions of blocks. It simply and naively concatenates them, which is insecure and lets an adversary craft a "cross-linked block" (block with cross-linked transactions) which alters the way peers process transactions. For example, it is possible to select a transaction and manipulate a peer to completely avoid processing it, without changing the computed hash of the block. Additional validations have been added in v2.2.14 and v2.5.5 to detect potential cross-linking issues before processing blocks. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.
Affected: Go: github.com/hyperledger/fabric
# Short summary
Combining two molecules to one another, called "cross-linking" results in a molecule with a chemical formula that is composed of all atoms of the original two molecules.
In Fabric, one can take a block of transactions and cross-link the transactions in a way that alters the way the peers parse the transactions. If a first peer receives a block `B` and a second peer receives a block identical to `B` but with the transactions being cross-linked, the second peer will parse transactions in a different way and thus its world state will deviate from the first peer.
Orderers or peers cannot detect that a block has its transactions cross-linked, because there is a vulnerability in the way Fabric hashes the transactions of blocks. It simply and naively concatenates them, which is insecure and lets an adversary craft a "cross-linked block" (block with cross-linked transactions) which alters the way peers process transactions. For example, it is possible to select a transaction and manipulate a peer to completely avoid processing it, without changing the computed hash of the block.
Additional validations have been added in v2.2.14 and v2.5.5 to detect potential cross-linking issues before processing blocks.
## Impact In V1 and V2, we only have a crash fault tolerant orderer and as such, the security model Fabric operates in is that the orderer is honest, but peers may be malicious. As such, a peer that replicates a block from a malicious peer can have a state fo…