ChainBleedv0.1 · open intel
← back to feed·ETHORACLE2021-10-27 · 4y ago
Incident · DEFILLAMA

CREAM Lending

Flashloan Price Oracle Attack
Estimated loss
$130.00M
VERDICT —AUDIT-CATCHABLE
Using an instantaneous share-price function from an externally-mintable vault as a collateral oracle is a known-class footgun (Harvest, bZx, Warp Finance precedents). A competent reviewer briefed on prior pricePerShare-manipulation incidents would have flagged the custom yUSDVault adapter as the most attackable surface.
▰ METHOD
Flashloan Price Oracle Attack
ORACLEBYTECODE CATCHABLEAI SCANNABLE
Root cause

CREAM's PriceOracleProxy priced crYUSDVault collateral by reading yUSDVault.pricePerShare() live, computed as totalAssets / totalSupply of the underlying Yearn vault. The attacker, using flash loans from MakerDAO and AAVE, simultaneously (a) accumulated ~$1.5B in yUSDVault and supplied it to CREAM as collateral, then (b) redeemed ~$500M of yUSDVault from Yearn, collapsing totalSupply to ~$8M, and (c) donated ~$8M of yUSD into the vault. The donation roughly doubled pricePerShare instantaneously because the share count had been deflated. CREAM's oracle re-read the manipulated pricePerShare and re-valued the attacker's existing crYUSD position to ~$3B, unlocking enough borrow capacity to drain ~$130M across all CREAM markets. The vulnerability class is an unbounded, atomically-manipulable spot oracle reading derivative-token share price without TWAP, deposit cap, or sanity bounds.

▰ PROOF OF CONCEPT
DEFIHACKLABS
src/test/2021-10/Cream_2_exp.sol
view forked test on github ↗

Reproducible Foundry test fork from SunWeb3Sec/DeFiHackLabs. Clone the repo, run forge test against the file path above, and replay the exploit against a mainnet fork at the historical block. Use for reproduction only — not for live targets.

Forensic narrative

Classification: Ecosystem. Technique: Flashloan Price Oracle Attack. Target type: DeFi Protocol. Affected chains: Ethereum. Implementation language: Solidity.

Primary source
https://mudit.blog/cream-hack-analysis/
Sourced from
DefiLlama Hacks dataset · api.llama.fi/hacks
Technical record
chain
ethereum
protocol
CREAM Lending
bug_class
oracle
date_occurred
2021-10-27
loss_usd
$130,000,000
classification
Ecosystem
technique
Flashloan Price Oracle Attack
target_type
DeFi Protocol
language
Solidity
source_id
dl:121
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