At Coinbase, our primary precedence is making certain that we uphold our safety commitments to our clients. On February 11, 2022, we acquired a report from a third-party researcher indicating that they’d uncovered a flaw in Coinbase’s buying and selling interface. We promptly mobilized our safety incident response workforce to establish and patch the bug, and resolved the underlying system concern with none affect to buyer funds.
This weblog publish supplies a deeper look into the timeline of occasions surrounding the bug report, in addition to an evidence of the bug itself and the steps we took to resolve it and guarantee it can not occur once more.
(notice, all occasions occurred on February 11, 2022, and all instances are in PST)
- 10:16 AM: A member of the crypto group tweets that they’ve uncovered a critical flaw within the Coinbase buying and selling interface, and requests contacts within the Coinbase Safety workforce.
- 11:00 AM: Primarily based on restricted preliminary info supplied by intermediaries, Coinbase Safety declares an incident and mobilizes engineering assets to start testing all buying and selling interfaces to find out the validity of the alleged bug.
- 11:21 AM: The crypto researcher information a vulnerability report through HackerOne, Coinbase’s bug bounty platform, indicating that the flaw resides in a particular API for Retail Superior Buying and selling. Coinbase engineers additionally full a evaluation of all different person interfaces and Coinbase Change APIs and decide that they don’t seem to be impacted.
- 11:42 AM: Coinbase engineers are in a position to reproduce the bug, and the Retail Superior Buying and selling platform is positioned into cancel-only mode, disabling new trades.
- 4:01 PM: A patch is validated and launched, resolving the incident.
The underlying explanation for the bug was a lacking logic validation test in a Retail Brokerage API endpoint, which allowed a person to submit trades to a particular order guide utilizing a mismatched supply account. This API is just utilized by our Retail Superior Buying and selling platform, which is at present in restricted beta launch.
To offer an instance:
- A person has an account with 100 SHIB, and a second account with 0 BTC.
- The person submits a market order to the BTC-USD order guide to promote 100 BTC, however manually edits their API request to specify their SHIB account because the supply of funds.
- Right here, the validation service would test to find out whether or not the supply account had a adequate stability to finish the commerce, however not whether or not the supply account matched the proposed asset for submitting the commerce.
- Consequently, a market order to promote 100 BTC on the BTC-USD order guide could be entered on the Coinbase Change.
There have been mitigating elements that will have restricted the affect of this flaw had it been exploited at scale. For instance, Coinbase Change has computerized worth safety circuit breakers, and our commerce surveillance workforce constantly screens our markets for well being and anomalous buying and selling exercise.
Because of the researcher who responsibly disclosed this concern, Coinbase was in a position to repair this bug in a matter of hours, and conclusively decide that it has by no means been maliciously exploited. Now we have additionally applied further checks to make sure that it can not occur once more.
Coinbase strongly helps impartial safety analysis, and when these researchers uncover critical points, we wish to make sure that they’re rewarded accordingly. Consequently, we’re paying our largest-ever bug bounty for this discovering: $250,000.
We welcome future submissions from this researcher and others through our HackerOne program: https://hackerone.com/coinbase.