Sparkn

Summary

After the conclusion of a contest and the allocation of its funds, there exists a scenario where certain sponsors might inadvertently continue to provide funding for the same contest. This situation arises due to the absence of a preventive mechanism that would prohibit completed contests from receiving further funding. Consequently, this contest, which corresponds to a proxy, could receive additional funding from sponsors in error. As a result, the organizer linked to this contest proxy retains the ability to invoke the "deployProxyAndDistribute" function once more. This action leads to the re-distribution of these funds to supporters who have not contributed to solving any problems on this occasion. It's worth noting that this sequence of events can occur prior to the owner executing the "distributeByOwner" function.

The reason for this timing discrepancy lies in the fact that there exists a waiting period defined as "EXPIRATION_TIME = 7 days" During these 7 days, the owner of the contest must wait before being able to retrieve the trapped funds. Within this timeframe, which spans a week, a malicious organizer could exploit the opportunity to distribute the funds to undeserving recipients. This window of time allows for the re-distribution of funds to occur before the owner's ability to reclaim them via the "distributeByOwner" function comes into play.

Vulnerability Details

Impact

When a completed contest receives funding again from a sponsor by mistake or any other reason, a malicious organizer can distribute these funds before the contest owner has a chance to intervene. This introduces centralisation risks not only for the owner, as was already the case, but also for the organizer.

Tools Used

Foundry

Recommendations

Add code for sponsors to check if the contest corresponding to given proxy address is already completed or not, and even then if sponsors sends funds by mistake, add code for owner to rescue this fund as soon as possible and not wait for "EXPIRATION_TIME = 7 days" or organiser will front-run this opportunity.