Statusl: Attacker recovers their full staked principal via the paused-revert catch path while the S

Source & credit. Reproduction of a public audit finding curated by AuditVault — the original finding: 65325-malicious-actors-can-get-free-rewards-if-contract-gets-pause. Standalone Foundry PoC and full write-up: 65325-malicious-actors-can-get-free-rewards-if-contract-gets-pause_exp in the evm-hack-registry mirror.

Vulnerability classes: vuln/theft · 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#

Attacker recovers their full staked principal via the paused-revert catch path while the StakeManager still counts the phantom stake, letting them drain 50 reward tokens from the pool for free at honest stakers' expense.

SOLIDITY

                    revert StakeVault__FailedToLeave();
                }
            }
        } catch { // @> try/catch swallows StakeManager.leave() revert: vault returns staked tokens while the manager keeps counting the stake
            if (lockUntil <= block.timestamp) {
                depositedBalance = 0;

Why it's exploitable here#

Attack path#

flowchart TD S0["Owner stakes and locks tokens"] S1["Exit path returns principal"] S2["Catch swallows paused revert"] S3["Require lock period expired"] S4["Verify principal transfer"] H["Attacker recovers their full staked principal via the paused-revert ca"] 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 0xbd4fd5a3ce…:

L158 — Owner stakes and locks tokens: Setup: stake() locks the owner's tokens and registers the position with the StakeManager.
L166 — Exit path returns principal: Setup: leave() is the exit that tries to unstake from the manager and send principal to a destination.
L176 — Catch swallows paused revert: Root cause: on a paused-manager revert this catch returns principal but leaves the phantom stake the manager still counts, so the attacker keeps free rewards.
L177 — Require lock period expired: Only proceeds to return funds once the lock has elapsed (lockUntil <= block.timestamp).
L180 — Verify principal transfer: Checks the principal transfer to the destination actually succeeded.
L203 — Declare NotOwner error: Setup: declares the StakeVault__NotOwner custom error.
L207 — Owner-only access guard: Setup: restricts vault actions to the owner via a msg.sender != owner check.

PoC#

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

BASH

cd 65325-malicious-actors-can-get-free-rewards-if-contract-gets-pause_exp
forge test -vvv

The browser Playground replays the same synthetic opcode-for-opcode and measures the harm: Attacker recovers their full staked principal via the paused-revert catch path while the StakeManager still counts the phantom stake, lettin. Both gates are green (registry forge test PASS + Playground _verify-poc VERDICT: PASS).

Sources & further analysis#

Reproductions & code

Standalone PoC + full trace: 65325-malicious-actors-can-get-free-rewards-if-contract-gets-pause_exp (evm-hack-registry mirror).
AuditVault finding: 65325-malicious-actors-can-get-free-rewards-if-contract-gets-pause.
Upstream DeFiHackLabs PoC directory: src/test.

Alerts & third-party analyses

DeFiHackLabs incident explorer: search "Statusl: Attacker recovers their full staked principal via the paused-revert catch path while the S".
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