Project

Summary

The absence of event logging across several key functions, especially within high-privilege functions, opens a critical vulnerability where administrators or privileged users could perform untracked and potentially malicious actions. These actions, including undetected minting, burning, and transferring of tokens, allow an attacker to conduct operations without off-chain visibility, resulting in hidden token movements and unauthorized account manipulation. This gap in transparency could severely undermine the integrity of the system, leaving users, auditors, and decentralized applications blind to token state changes, ownership transfers, and other critical activities.

Vulnerability Details

Within the OWPIdentity contract, multiple functions controlled by privileged roles lack event emissions. Functions such as mint, burn, and updateDAOMembership, intended to be transparent in token and role management, are missing event logs. This absence is particularly dangerous in a decentralized environment, where tracking state changes off-chain is essential for ecosystem security and user trust.

Combined, these vulnerabilities enable a scenario where an attacker with privileged access could exploit untracked operations for hidden minting, transferring, and burning of tokens. By calling the mint or mintBatch functions without any event emissions, a privileged user could generate tokens and distribute them to addresses of choice, thereby silently inflating supply or reallocating ownership. Likewise, the burnBatchMultiple function could be used to erase token balances, all without triggering alerts for any off-chain observer.

The vulnerability extends beyond mere minting and burning, as untracked actions can also occur in DAO membership updates (updateDAOMembership) and external contract interactions (callExternalContract). Combined with role-granting functions missing event emissions, this could lead to a hidden reconfiguration of role privileges, ultimately putting control in the hands of an attacker or malicious administrator.

Link to the Affected Codes

• mint function in OWPIdentity.sol (lines 23-25)

  • https://github.com/Cyfrin/2024-11-one-world/blob/1e872c7ab393c380010a507398d4b4caca1ae32b/contracts/OWPIdentity.sol#L23-L25

• mintBatch function in OWPIdentity.sol (lines 38-43)

  • https://github.com/Cyfrin/2024-11-one-world/blob/1e872c7ab393c380010a507398d4b4caca1ae32b/contracts/OWPIdentity.sol#L38-L43

• burnBatchMultiple function in OWPIdentity.sol (lines 59-69)

  • https://github.com/Cyfrin/2024-11-one-world/blob/1e872c7ab393c380010a507398d4b4caca1ae32b/contracts/OWPIdentity.sol#L59-L69

• updateDAOMembership function in MembershipFactory.sol (lines 100-109)

  • https://github.com/Cyfrin/2024-11-one-world/blob/1e872c7ab393c380010a507398d4b4caca1ae32b/contracts/dao/MembershipFactory.sol#L100-L109

• callExternalContract function in MembershipFactory.sol (lines 176-180)

  • https://github.com/Cyfrin/2024-11-one-world/blob/1e872c7ab393c380010a507398d4b4caca1ae32b/contracts/dao/MembershipFactory.sol#L176-L180

• setCurrencyManager function in MembershipFactory.sol (lines 163-166)

  • https://github.com/Cyfrin/2024-11-one-world/blob/1e872c7ab393c380010a507398d4b4caca1ae32b/contracts/dao/MembershipFactory.sol#L163-L166

Impact

Undetectable Privileged Actions Leading to Hidden Transfer and Minting of Tokens. The likelihood of this vulnerability being exploited is high in any environment where privileged roles are accessible. Given that administrative access could be obtained through social engineering or contract compromise, the probability of undetected actions taking place increases. The unlogged nature of these operations amplifies the risk, as the absence of event emissions serves as a cloak, concealing actions that would otherwise be flagged by automated or manual monitoring tools.

The absence of event emissions makes it difficult, if not impossible, to track privileged activities off-chain. This enables a stealth attack where unauthorized minting, burning, or transfer actions occur without detection by external observers, including users, third-party applications, and auditors. Such an exploit would critically undermine trust and transparency within the system, as affected users would be unaware of token balances being modified or ownership being silently reassigned.

This stealth vulnerability threatens the contract’s fundamental integrity and could result in substantial financial and reputational damage to the platform. An attacker leveraging this could reconfigure the token state and user permissions at will, operating in a shadowed environment without accountability.

Proof of Concept

1. Undetected Minting and Transfer of Tokens: A privileged user calls the mint or mintBatch functions without emitting events, distributing tokens to addresses under their control. These tokens could then be used for unauthorized governance votes or liquidated on exchanges without external systems detecting the supply increase.

2. Hidden Membership and Role Update Exploits: The updateDAOMembership and callExternalContract functions allow hidden modifications to DAO membership or external contract configurations. A malicious user could add unauthorized addresses to privileged roles, creating an attack vector for further unmonitored privilege escalation.

3. Silent Token Destruction: The burnBatchMultiple function is executed, erasing tokens from specific user accounts without triggering event logs. Users would not see these balance reductions reflected in off-chain systems, which rely on event logs for updates.

Tools Used

Manual Review

Recommendations

To prevent this attack, ensure that all privileged functions have appropriate event emissions capturing relevant data, including:

• Mint and Burn events for each minting or burning function.

• Role and Membership Change Events for functions affecting user roles and DAO configurations.

• External Call Events for any function making external contract calls, logging parameters such as target address, caller, and execution status.

Additionally, require that all event emissions be indexed by role and user address, facilitating off-chain tracking and verification by external applications and users.