A $3,000 Server Nearly Triggered a $70 Billion Crypto Disaster

Author: Oliver Knight

Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News

A server worth $3,000 is enough for a blockchain security researcher to simulate an attack path, which they say could put up to $70 billion worth of crypto infrastructure at risk.

The protagonist of this vulnerability incident is the Move language-based public chain Aptos; Move originates from Meta's shelved Diem stablecoin project.

In late February, researchers from security company Hexens reported a high-risk vulnerability in the Aptos Move virtual machine to the Aptos development team; this virtual machine is responsible for on-chain smart contract execution.

The essence of the vulnerability is a type confusion defect caused by cache invalidation: attackers can tamper with the cache to deceive the system into identifying one type of on-chain resource as another.

The Aptos team has completed full network patch deployment after receiving the vulnerability report, and no user assets were stolen throughout the process.

An Aptos spokesperson responded to CoinDesk: "On February 25, we received this potential risk report through the bug bounty program, and internal vulnerability screening was carried out simultaneously at that time. The team completed the fix, testing, and deployment to the mainnet within hours after confirming the vulnerability, with no users or funds harmed throughout the process." However, the official side also raised objections to the actual exploitability of the vulnerability, stating that according to internal analysis, it is extremely difficult to implement an attack in a real online environment.

However, the vulnerability details disclosed by the security team reveal that the entire crypto industry narrowly missed a major security disaster capable of reshaping the industry landscape.

The reason why this vulnerability carries extremely high risk lies in the permission storage mechanism of the Move language: core protocol permissions such as minting permissions, cross-chain bridge management rights, and lending market administrators are all stored directly as on-chain resources.

Once such permission resources are compromised, the risk will not be limited to a single protocol; all applications relying on this permission will be compromised accordingly.

Hexens researchers provided a layman's analogy: the harm of this vulnerability is equivalent to a high-risk defect appearing in Ethereum-based public chains, where attacker contracts can bypass type safety mechanisms to directly write to and tamper with the storage data of other smart contracts — and type safety is the core protective barrier designed at the beginning of the Move language.

Polygon Chief Technology Officer Mudit Gupta independently verified the vulnerability verification demo package and confirmed that the attack process is truly feasible: "The entire attack logic is completely valid, the demo reproduction was successful, and the prerequisites required for the attack in the mainnet environment can all be met."

Security firm Grego AI also independently reproduced the vulnerability, and its calculation data shows that approximately $250 million worth of native locked assets on the Aptos mainnet alone are directly exposed to risk, not including broader cross-chain risks.

$70 Billion Risk

The vulnerability was discovered by Hexens co-founder and CTO Vahe Karapetyan.

If not fixed in time, the vulnerability could open up risk exposures across the full chain of cross-chain bridges, stablecoins, various DeFi protocols, and centralized exchanges, triggering hundreds of billions of dollars in asset losses and causing an industry-wide crisis.

Setting up the entire attack environment requires only a $3,000 server; malicious hackers implementing the attack do not even need to fully simulate a cluster, costing only hundreds of dollars, and do not need to control validator nodes, possess internal information, or obtain high-level protocol permissions.

The research team conducted about 20 rounds of attack simulations in a simulated mainnet environment, succeeding 17 to 18 times.

The remaining 2 to 3 failures would not cause network downtime; attackers could retry repeatedly until successful.

The simulation cluster replicated the complete real mainnet environment: building more than 30 validator nodes, restoring real staking distribution, and replicating daily transaction traffic and block congestion scenarios.

The team also adopted non-attack pre-calibration technology to calculate the mempool and block packaging operating status before formally launching an attack, significantly reducing the uncertainty brought by attack randomness and significantly improving the success rate in actual operations.

Hexens calculated based on public on-chain data that the direct risk exposure of Aptos native DeFi, tokenized assets, stablecoins, and liquid staking protocols alone reaches billions of dollars.

And the risk of underlying public chain vulnerabilities is never limited to a single public chain.

Combining exposures such as cross-chain bridges, cross-chain communication protocols, stablecoin issuance chains, and centralized exchanges, the overall systemic risk scale is estimated to be as high as $70 billion.

Grego AI CEO Justus Hanna stated that attackers could use this vulnerability to seize core management permissions of mainstream cross-infrastructure such as LayerZero, Wormhole, and cross-chain transfer protocol CCTP, theoretically able to drain all associated locked funds.

This simulation test is sufficient to prove that hidden vulnerabilities at the underlying layer of public chains can bring devastating industry risks.

If hackers use this vulnerability to launch a real attack, the scale of losses will far exceed the $1.5 billion theft incident at Bybit exchange last year.

Just in June, Zcash plummeted 38% due to a high-risk vulnerability hidden in the privacy pool for four years; this vulnerability allowed attackers to infinitely mint counterfeit tokens and was difficult to detect; before this, multiple billion-level cross-chain bridge and smart contract theft incidents had continued to shake market confidence in infrastructure.

The $70 billion risk calculation is based on an extreme scenario where attackers mass-mint USDC and use Circle CCTP to cross to multiple public chains.

Theoretically, if the incident breaks out, Circle is highly likely to suspend USDC transfers, but Circle has previously stated that it will not freeze user assets without judicial authorization, creating execution uncertainty.

Even if relevant platforms implement emergency risk control interception, the impact of this vulnerability will severely hurt the entire crypto market.

The research team confirmed through verification demos that the vulnerability can seize top-level management permissions of the cross-chain system, including minting master control permissions, signature permissions, and protocol accounting control rights.

They fully reproduced the master control permission takeover process without actually minting tokens, but clearly proved that this risk must be included in the security threat model.

The main propagation path of the vulnerability is the cross-chain channel connecting Aptos to centralized exchanges; attackers can use this to tamper with exchange user deposit accounting data.

Response and Disclosure

On the same day Hexens submitted the report, an emergency response team named "SEAL911" was established to coordinate response measures.

Several hours after the response team was established, the project party received the complete vulnerability notification.

That afternoon, four major downstream core projects simultaneously received the vulnerability demo files and permission risk analysis.

On February 27, the official code repository publicly released the fix submission records; Aptos stated that private patches for validator nodes had been deployed before the public code went online.

At the same time, Hexens stated that they have not yet received a technical rebuttal with data support from Aptos; the other party only proposed that there is a probabilistic threshold for the attack.

Although no funds were stolen, simulation results indicate that in blockchain-level attacks, traffic limits, issuer freezes, cross-chain controls, exchange monitoring, and validator patches are not secondary security measures.

They directly determine whether the vulnerability is a local minor accident or a systemic collapse of the entire industry.