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Low 37 Cryptographic libraries

cryptonote_core: add change address sanity check

Public commit record

What the developer wrote

Authored by jeffro256

60/100 · Adequate
cryptonote_core: add change address sanity check

Prevents silly mistakes where wrong change address is passed
✓ Descriptive subject✓ Names a concrete action or component✓ Provides an explanatory body
The short version

What changed, and why it matters

This commit adds a safety check when building Monero transactions to make sure any 'change' output (leftover funds returned to the sender) actually belongs to the sender's wallet. Before this change, a wallet or tool could accidentally specify a change address it did not control, sending leftover funds to a stranger or attacker. The fix re-derives the change address from the wallet's keys and rejects the transaction if it does not match. It is a defensive hardening measure rather than a fix for an active remote exploit.

Recommended action

Treat as a low-to-moderate defensive security improvement. Review downstream wallet and RPC code to ensure callers pass an explicit, validated change address and handle the new failure path gracefully. No emergency deployment is indicated, but the change should be included in the next release and release notes should mention the added protection against accidental change-address mistakes.

Security signals we found

01

Defensive validation of change address ownership during transaction construction

02

Prevention of accidental loss of funds due to wrong change address

03

CHECK_AND_ASSERT_MES hard-fail on unrecognized non-zero change destination

04

Hardware device address re-derivation used as trust anchor

05

No remote/network attack surface; issue is at wallet/transaction-building layer

Risk score

Why this scored 37/100

Our methodology →
Potential impact 12/30
Exploitability 5/25
Stealth signal 3/15
Affected reach 6/15
Confidence 7/10
Evidence quality 4/5
Human-validated context

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