The initial release of yVault contained logic for computing the price of yUSDC that could be manipulated by an attacker to drain most (if not all) of the pool’s assets. Fortunately, Andre, the developer, reacted incredibly quickly and disabled the faulty code, securing the approximately 400,000 USD held at the time. However, this bug still highlights the risk stemming from increased complexity caused by composition in the DeFi space.
What is yVault?
On July 25th 2020, yEarn launched a new service called yVault: Users could deposit tokens in the vault, which would then be supplied to a DeFi protocol chosen to maximize their interest.
The initial release supported USDC and integrated with the USDC/MUSD Balancer pool. Any USDC held by the vault would be supplied to the Balancer pool as liquidity, and the vault would receive BPT tokens in return.
To use the vault, a user sends USDC and is minted yUSDC. Similarly, USDC can be withdrawn by burning yUSDC. These two operations rely on a dynamically calculated exchange rate, defined as the ratio of the value of the BPT held by the contract and the total supply of yUSDC. Since the value of BPT goes up when fees are paid by traders, the value of each yUSDC token slowly goes up over time.
Within an hour of yVault’s release, users had already deposited around 400,000 USDC, so I knew I had to take a look at the code for myself.
What was the bug?
Since the initial release integrated with Balancer, let’s consider how Balancer works. Balancer removes the need for liquidity providers to manually rebalance their portfolio by incentivizing rational market actors to do so instead. If a token goes up in price, the pool will become unbalanced. While normally a liquidity provider may need to pay fees in order to sell a token that has increased in value, Balancer incentivizes external users to pay a fee for the privilege of purchasing the token at a profit instead. The fees paid are then distributed to the liquidity providers.
Figure 1 presents the equation used to calculate the amount of tokens received based on the state of the Balancer pool and the amount of tokens sent. For the remainder of this post, let’s refer to the MUSD/USDC 50/50 pool. The swap fee is 0.05%.
/********************************************************************************************** // calcOutGivenIn // // aO = tokenAmountOut // // bO = tokenBalanceOut // // bI = tokenBalanceIn / / bI \ (wI / wO) \ // // aI = tokenAmountIn aO = bO * | 1 - | -------------------------- | ^ | // // wI = tokenWeightIn \ \ ( bI + ( aI * ( 1 - sF )) / / // // wO = tokenWeightOut // // sF = swapFee // **********************************************************************************************/
Figure 1: Token output given input.
First, to get a sense of how this function behaves, we’ll see what happens when a rational market actor swaps a pool back into balance and when an irrational market actor swaps a pool out of balance.
Suppose the pool is currently out of balance and contains 1,100,000 USDC and 900,000 MUSD. If a rational market actor pays 90,000 MUSD, they’ll receive 99,954 USDC in exchange and make 9,954 USDC in profit. A very good deal!
Now suppose the pool is currently balanced and contains 1,000,000 USDC and 1,000,000 MUSD. What happens if an irrational market actor pays 100,000 USDC? Well, they would receive 90,867 MUSD for a loss of 9,133 MUSD. Not such a great deal.
Although the second trade results in an immediate loss and thus seems rather useless, pairing it with the first trade results in some interesting behavior.
Consider a user who first performs The Bad Trade: The user converts 100,000 USDC to 90,867 MUSD, losing 9,133 USD in the process. Then, the user performs The Good Trade and converts 90,867 MUSD to 99,908 USDC, earning 9,041 USD in the process. This results in a net loss of 92 USD. Not ideal, but certainly not as bad as the loss of 9,200 USD.
Now consider the valuation of BPT during this process. If you held 1% of the total BPT, at the start of the transaction your tokens would have been worth 1% of 2,000,000 USD, or 20,000 USD. At the end of the transaction, your tokens would have been worth 1% of 2,000,092 USD, or 20,000.96 USD. Yet for a magical moment, right in the middle of the transaction, your tokens were worth 1% of 2,009,133 USD, or 20,091.33 USD. This is the crux of the vulnerability at hand.
Knowing this, I applied the same process behavior to yVault. Before The Bad Trade, the vault holds some BPT worth some amount of USD. After The Good Trade, the vault holds the same amount of BPT worth a slightly larger amount of USD. However, between The Bad Trade and The Good Trade, the vault holds some BPT worth a significantly larger amount of USD.
Recall that the value of yUSDC is directly proportional to the value of the BPT it holds. If we bought yUSDC before The Bad Trade and sold yUSDC before The Good Trade, we would instantaneously make a profit. Repeat this enough times, and we would drain the vault.
How was it fixed?
It turns out that accurately calculating the true value of BPT and preventing attackers from extracting profit from slippage is a difficult problem to solve. Instead, the developer, Andre, deployed a new strategy that simply converts USDC to MUSD and supplies it to the mStable savings account was deployed and activated.
Future Recommendations
DeFi composability is hard, and it’s easy to accidentally expose your new protocol to unexpected risk. If you integrate multiple tokens, any one token could compromise the security of your entire platform. On the other hand, if you integrate multiple platforms, your protocol could suffer from complex interactions.
Security tooling can be used to help prevent most simple bugs in code:
- Crytic uses an advanced version of Slither to automatically detect up to 90 types of vulnerabilities
- Echidna asserts specific properties through fuzz testing
- Manticore can symbolically analyze your code
Of course, tooling isn’t a panacea for security. In our study “What are the Actual Flaws in Important Smart Contracts (and How Can We Find Them)?” we discovered that almost 50% of findings were unlikely to be detected by tooling, even if the technology significantly improves. For complex codebases and DeFi projects, reach out to us to arrange a security assessment, or sign up for our Ethereum security office hours.