State Divergence Enables Unauthorized Access

[carlospolop]

🤖 Automated Content Update

This PR was automatically generated by the HackTricks News Bot based on a technical blog post.

📝 Source Information

• Blog URL: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/08/25/state-divergence-enables-unauthorized-access
• Blog Title: State Divergence Enables Unauthorized Access
• Suggested Section: Generic Methodologies & Resources > Blockchain & Crypto > State Divergence and Default-Value Authorization Bypasses

🎯 Content Summary

Overview: Trail of Bits discovered a critical authorization bypass in the marker module of Provenance Blockchain, a public proof-of-stake blockchain built on the Cosmos SDK. Provenance markers represent fungible financial assets, including tokenized loans, private equity tokens, bridged assets, deposits, yield tokens, and asset registries. On affected markers, any blockchain user could grant their own address administrative privilege...

🔧 Technical Details

State-divergence authorization bypass: When a security-relevant value is stored in multiple components, map every read and write to determine whether authorization uses the authoritative copy. If normal operations update one subsystem while an access check reads a stale structure, cache, or metadata field, an attacker may be able to satisfy the check using values that no longer represent reality. Test this by creating an object, performing state-changing operations such as minting or transferring, and comparing each duplicated representation before attempting protected actions.

Default-value equality bypass: An authorization predicate of the form callerValue == protectedValue is bypassable when both values can equal a default such as zero. Test protected operations with a fresh or empty account against newly created, unfunded, reset, expired, or desynchronized objects. The secure predicate must validate the compared value ind...

🤖 Agent Actions

Implemented the HackTricks update:

• Added state-divergence-default-value-authorization-bypasses.md under the blockchain section.
• Documented stale-state authorization checks, zero-equality bypasses, ACL takeover chains, secure predicates, and stateful fuzzing invariants.
• Added numbered references to the original Trail of Bits research and Provenance patches.
• Linked the page from the blockchain README.

Validation passed for formatting, citations, internal references, forbidden sources, and git diff --check. Full mdBook build was unavailable because mdbook is not installed.

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[carlospolop]

🔗 Additional Context

Original Blog Post: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/08/25/state-divergence-enables-unauthorized-access

Content Categories: Based on the analysis, this content was categorized under "Generic Methodologies & Resources > Blockchain & Crypto > State Divergence and Default-Value Authorization Bypasses".

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