What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-41135: Authz Module Non-Determinism

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.0 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2021-10-20 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-754

Description

The Cosmos-SDK is a framework for building blockchain applications in Golang. Affected versions of the SDK were vulnerable to a consensus halt due to non-deterministic behaviour in a ValidateBasic method in the x/authz module. The MsgGrant of the x/authz module contains a Grant field which includes a user-defined expiration time for when the authorization grant expires. In Grant.ValidateBasic(), that time is compared to the node’s local clock time. Any chain running an affected version of the SDK with the authz module enabled could be halted by anyone with the ability to send transactions on that chain. Recovery would require applying the patch and rolling back the latest block. Users are advised to update to version 0.44.2.

Affected products

• cosmos-sdk: from 0.43.0 before 0.44.2 — fixed in 0.44.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: cosmos-sdk 0.44.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://forum.cosmos.network/t/cosmos-sdk-vulnerability-retrospective-security-advisory-jackfruit-october-12-2021/5349
• https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk/commit/68ab790a761e80d3674f821794cf18ccbfed45ee
• https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk/security/advisories/GHSA-2p6r-37p9-89p2
• https://forum.cosmos.network/t/cosmos-sdk-vulnerability-retrospective-security-advisory-jackfruit-october-12-2021/5349
• https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk/commit/68ab790a761e80d3674f821794cf18ccbfed45ee
• https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk/security/advisories/GHSA-2p6r-37p9-89p2

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