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How I Use a JSON 0-Day to Steal Your Money on the Blockchain

Hao XingZekai Wu

Hao Xing and Zekai Wu disclose a universal zero-day deserialization bypass in Fastjson, exploiting Java web services to execute RCE and drain crypto nodes.

Summary

The Proliferation of Fastjson in Enterprise and Blockchain Services

With over 23,000 GitHub stars, Fastjson is one of the most widely deployed open-source JSON parsers in Java web services and cryptocurrency exchange backends.

Bypassing Modern Fastjson SafeMode and Deserialization Blacklists

Hao Xing and Zekai Wu uncover novel class inheritance chains that completely circumvent Fastjson's security checks and AutoType restrictions.

Achieving Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution

Submitting crafted JSON payloads allows an attacker to instantiate dangerous Java gadget chains, achieving full remote code execution on target servers.

Targeting Blockchain Gateways and Remediation

The researchers demonstrate real-world attacks against cryptocurrency wallet services and coordinate upstream patches with the Alibaba Fastjson team.

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