XRP Ledger activated an amendment that closes a flaw letting an account authorized only to burn issued tokens create new ones under certain conditions. The native XRP supply was not affected. A brief drop in validator support in October pushed the activation back to November.
XRP Ledger activated the fixCleanup3_4_0 amendment on November 4 at 14:52 UTC, at ledger 108,112,129, closing a vulnerability in its permission delegation system. The flaw let accounts with permission to destroy issued tokens create new ones under certain conditions.
The PaymentBurn flaw let burners mint tokens
The vulnerability involved a delegated permission called PaymentBurn, which allows an approved account to destroy tokens issued by another account. An issuer could grant it to a payment service handling stablecoin redemptions, so the service could destroy redeemed tokens without receiving permission to create replacements.
However, the previous transaction rules could let an account holding only PaymentBurn authorization create issued tokens under certain conditions. The problem arose when payments using the delegated permission crossed a zero-balance boundary, and the amendment now stops transactions from crossing it.
The affected assets included stablecoins, trust-line tokens and Multi-Purpose Tokens. XRP itself sat outside the affected permission system, so the flaw did not allow unauthorized creation of the native cryptocurrency. No publicly confirmed exploitation has been reported, and the available disclosures do not identify an issuer that suffered unauthorized token creation.
Validator support dip delayed activation
Developers included the correction in XRP Ledger server version 3.4.0 in September, but amendments need support from more than 80% of trusted validators for 14 consecutive days. With 35 validators on the tracked default list, at least 29 must back an amendment throughout that period.
The first approval period began on October 9. Then validator support dropped below the required threshold on October 21, ending the first attempt after 12 days and three hours. A new majority formed later that day and started another two-week wait, which lasted 14 days and five minutes before the network enabled the amendment.
Trading, signing and lending fixes ride along
The amendment also corrects several other transaction functions. It prevents a transaction from destroying a liquidity provider's tokens when rounding calculations would leave the issuer recovering no underlying assets, and it introduces distinct signing prefixes so a signature meant for one transaction role cannot be reused in another.
It also includes accounting corrections for Single Asset Vaults and the proposed lending protocol. However, it does not activate the lending features, which each need separate approval from validators.
Source: crypto.news
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