PuppyRaffle::enterRaffle's duplicate-check is a nested loop over the entire players array, making it O(n^2). Gas cost per additional entrant grows with however many players are already registered, so the raffle becomes progressively more expensive to enter and can eventually become prohibitively expensive (or exceed the block gas limit) purely from organic growth -- or be deliberately worsened by an attacker who front-loads the array with junk entries.
Every call to enterRaffle re-scans the entire current players array pairwise, even though only the newly-added entries could possibly introduce a fresh duplicate. As players.length grows, each new entrant pays gas proportional to the square of the current player count.
Likelihood:
This triggers automatically as the raffle fills up -- no attacker action is required, though an attacker can also intentionally submit large batches of unique addresses in early transactions specifically to inflate gas costs for everyone who enters afterward.
The larger the raffle is intended to run (more players, bigger prize pools), the more certain this becomes a practical problem rather than a theoretical one.
Impact:
Later entrants pay dramatically more gas than earlier ones for the exact same action (entering one address), which is unfair and can make entering the raffle uneconomical or outright fail once gas cost approaches the block gas limit.
In the worst case this creates a denial-of-service: once the array is large enough, enterRaffle reverts for everyone (out-of-gas), freezing the raffle.
Run with forge test --match-test test_H3_duplicateCheckIsQuadratic_growingGasDoS -vv. The 302nd entrant (one address, against 301 existing players) pays over 50x the gas the 1st entrant (empty array) paid for identical work -- and the gap only grows as more players join.
Track membership with a mapping(address => bool) public isActivePlayer (or similar) so duplicate checks are O(1) per new entrant instead of O(n) against the whole array, removing the quadratic blowup entirely. Update the mapping in enterRaffle and clear it in refund/selectWinner alongside the array resets.
## Description `enterRaffle` function uses gas inefficient duplicate check that causes leads to Denial of Service, making subsequent participants to spend much more gas than previous users to enter. ## Vulnerability Details In the `enterRaffle` function, to check duplicates, it loops through the `players` array. As the `player` array grows, it will make more checks, which leads the later user to pay more gas than the earlier one. More users in the Raffle, more checks a user have to make leads to pay more gas. ## Impact As the arrays grows significantly over time, it will make the function unusable due to block gas limit. This is not a fair approach and lead to bad user experience. ## POC In existing test suit, add this test to see the difference b/w gas for users. once added run `forge test --match-test testEnterRaffleIsGasInefficient -vvvvv` in terminal. you will be able to see logs in terminal. ```solidity function testEnterRaffleIsGasInefficient() public { vm.startPrank(owner); vm.txGasPrice(1); /// First we enter 100 participants uint256 firstBatch = 100; address[] memory firstBatchPlayers = new address[](firstBatch); for(uint256 i = 0; i < firstBatchPlayers; i++) { firstBatch[i] = address(i); } uint256 gasStart = gasleft(); puppyRaffle.enterRaffle{value: entranceFee * firstBatch}(firstBatchPlayers); uint256 gasEnd = gasleft(); uint256 gasUsedForFirstBatch = (gasStart - gasEnd) * txPrice; console.log("Gas cost of the first 100 partipants is:", gasUsedForFirstBatch); /// Now we enter 100 more participants uint256 secondBatch = 200; address[] memory secondBatchPlayers = new address[](secondBatch); for(uint256 i = 100; i < secondBatchPlayers; i++) { secondBatch[i] = address(i); } gasStart = gasleft(); puppyRaffle.enterRaffle{value: entranceFee * secondBatch}(secondBatchPlayers); gasEnd = gasleft(); uint256 gasUsedForSecondBatch = (gasStart - gasEnd) * txPrice; console.log("Gas cost of the next 100 participant is:", gasUsedForSecondBatch); vm.stopPrank(owner); } ``` ## Recommendations Here are some of recommendations, any one of that can be used to mitigate this risk. 1. User a mapping to check duplicates. For this approach you to declare a variable `uint256 raffleID`, that way each raffle will have unique id. Add a mapping from player address to raffle id to keep of users for particular round. ```diff + uint256 public raffleID; + mapping (address => uint256) public usersToRaffleId; . . function enterRaffle(address[] memory newPlayers) public payable { require(msg.value == entranceFee * newPlayers.length, "PuppyRaffle: Must send enough to enter raffle"); for (uint256 i = 0; i < newPlayers.length; i++) { players.push(newPlayers[i]); + usersToRaffleId[newPlayers[i]] = true; } // Check for duplicates + for (uint256 i = 0; i < newPlayers.length; i++){ + require(usersToRaffleId[i] != raffleID, "PuppyRaffle: Already a participant"); - for (uint256 i = 0; i < players.length - 1; i++) { - for (uint256 j = i + 1; j < players.length; j++) { - require(players[i] != players[j], "PuppyRaffle: Duplicate player"); - } } emit RaffleEnter(newPlayers); } . . . function selectWinner() external { //Existing code + raffleID = raffleID + 1; } ``` 2. Allow duplicates participants, As technically you can't stop people participants more than once. As players can use new address to enter. ```solidity function enterRaffle(address[] memory newPlayers) public payable { require(msg.value == entranceFee * newPlayers.length, "PuppyRaffle: Must send enough to enter raffle"); for (uint256 i = 0; i < newPlayers.length; i++) { players.push(newPlayers[i]); } emit RaffleEnter(newPlayers); } ```
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