Statusl: A staker who pre-registers thousands of vaults makes slash()'s unbounded per-vault reward-

Source & credit. Reproduction of a public audit finding curated by AuditVault — the original finding: 65322-any-staker-can-fully-avoid-slashing-by-triggering-oog-revert. Standalone Foundry PoC and full write-up: 65322-any-staker-can-fully-avoid-slashing-by-triggering-oog-revert_exp in the evm-hack-registry mirror.

Vulnerability classes: vuln/locked-funds · vuln/reward-accounting

Reproduction: a faithful minimal reproduction of the vulnerable finding — the vulnerable function is reproduced verbatim (marked @>) with faithful minimal doubles; local deploy, no fork.

Root cause#

A staker who pre-registers thousands of vaults makes slash()'s unbounded per-vault reward-aggregation loop exceed the block gas limit, so slash() always OOG-reverts and the protocol can never seize the staker's 1000e18 slashable stake (slashing fully evaded).

SOLIDITY

        uint256 accountTotalRewards = 0;

        for (uint256 i = 0; i < accountVaults.length; i++) {
            accountTotalRewards += rewardsBalanceOf(accountVaults[i]); // @> unbounded loop over attacker-controlled accountVaults → slash() OOGs (slash DoS/evasion)
        }
        return accountTotalRewards;

Why it's exploitable here#

Attack path#

flowchart TD S0["Setup: set slashable stake"] S1["Register a new vault"] S2["Read one vault's rewards"] S3["Aggregate rewards across all vaults"] S4["Unbounded reward-sum loop"] H["A staker who pre-registers thousands of vaults makes slash()'s unbound"] S0 --> S1 S1 --> S2 S2 --> S3 S3 --> S4 S4 --> H

Marked-line walkthrough (Playground)#

The EVM Playground pins each step to the exact executed source line in 0x8ea53755a6…:

L89 — Setup: set slashable stake: Setup: setSlashableStake records the 1000e18 stake the protocol will later try, and fail, to seize.
L102 — Register a new vault: Each registration derives a fresh vault address and appends it to vaults[msg.sender], which the attacker inflates by the thousand.
L118 — Read one vault's rewards: rewardsBalanceOf returns a single vault's rewards — called once per vault inside the aggregation loop.
L134 — Aggregate rewards across all vaults: rewardsBalanceOfAccount loops over every vault the account registered — the cost that scales with attacker-registered vaults.
L139 — Unbounded reward-sum loop: Root-cause bug: this per-vault += runs over an unbounded, attacker-grown vault list, so slash() exhausts block gas and always reverts.
L148 — Comment: OOG reverts slash: A source comment confirming that when the loop runs out of gas the whole slash() reverts and no stake is seized.
L165 — View: account vault count: vaultCountOf exposes how many vaults an account holds — the count the attacker drives past the gas limit.

PoC#

Registry (Foundry, local deploy — verbatim vulnerable source + harm-asserting test + negative control):

BASH

cd 65322-any-staker-can-fully-avoid-slashing-by-triggering-oog-revert_exp
forge test -vvv

The browser Playground replays the same synthetic opcode-for-opcode and measures the harm: A staker who pre-registers thousands of vaults makes slash()'s unbounded per-vault reward-aggregation loop exceed the block gas limit, so sl. Both gates are green (registry forge test PASS + Playground _verify-poc VERDICT: PASS).

Sources & further analysis#

Reproductions & code

Standalone PoC + full trace: 65322-any-staker-can-fully-avoid-slashing-by-triggering-oog-revert_exp (evm-hack-registry mirror).
AuditVault finding: 65322-any-staker-can-fully-avoid-slashing-by-triggering-oog-revert.
Upstream DeFiHackLabs PoC directory: src/test.

Alerts & third-party analyses

DeFiHackLabs incident explorer: search "Statusl: A staker who pre-registers thousands of vaults makes slash()'s unbounded per-vault reward-".
Web3Sec X hacked database: search.
Rekt leaderboard: search.
Solodit incident search: search.

These dashboards index community alerts tweets, post-mortems, and independent write-ups. Reach them through the protocol name above to cross-check this reproduction against other analyses.

Source-level debugger — step opcodes and Solidity in sync