Defrost Finance

Private Key Leakage

Estimated loss

$12.17M

VERDICT —OUT OF SCOPE

Root cause is private-key / signer compromise — the on-chain contract behaved exactly as written. No pre-deployment source audit or bytecode review reaches the key-custody perimeter; this is operational-security territory (HSM/MPC hygiene, key rotation, hot-wallet isolation). Bytecode would show nothing wrong.

▰ METHOD

PRIVATE KEY

PRIVATE-KEY

Root cause

Root-cause analysis not yet published. The incident description below contains all currently available signal — review the attack transaction directly for definitive forensics.

▰ PROOF OF CONCEPT

DEFIHACKLABS

src/test/2022-12/Defrost_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

On December 23, Defrost Finance V2, the Avalanche ecological native stablecoin project, was attacked by a flash loan, and the hackers made a profit of $173,000. On December 25th, Defrost Finance V1 went wrong again, hackers managed to steal the owner’s key, the protocol was added with fake collateral tokens, and a malicious price oracle was used to liquidate current users, with losses estimated at more than $12 million. On December 27, the hackers who carried out the attack on Defrost Finance V1 have returned the stolen funds. Attack method (per SlowMist): Private Key Leakage. Reported loss: $ 12,173,000.

Primary source

https://foresightnews.pro/article/detail/22019 ↗

Sourced from

slowmist

Technical record