NRDAX-T0171 - Nil Node Dereference Panic

Fault termination · P2P and gossip · absent invariant · active · first seen 2026-07-02

provenance: Reproduced in NullRabbit's attack-reproduction pipeline

mechanism

CVE-2020-26264: a crafted LES GetProofsV2 storage-proof request (non-empty AccKey for a non-existent account) dereferences a nil account trie in the les server's GetProofsV2 handler → panic/crash (geth <1.9.25). Delivered after a real LES Status handshake to a synced --light.serve node; a patched server serves it safely (ProofsV2 reply) - the malicious request reaches the exact vulnerable handler.

live exposure

No exposure data. Slashr ↗ has no risk signal mapped to this technique yet — absence of data is not absence of exposure.

instances (2)

chain	primitive	fidelity	origin	reproducer (bundle)	source
ethereum	geth_les_getproofsv2_dos	lab	reverse-engineered-cve	geth_les_getproofsv2_dos	CVE-2020-26264 ↗
ethereum	geth_snap_trienode_dos	lab	reverse-engineered-cve	geth_snap_trienode_dos	GHSA-59hh-656j-3p7v ↗

references

cve: CVE-2026-46600

vendor-advisory: GHPR-erigontech-erigon-22649

vendor-advisory: GHPR-erigontech-erigon-22745

vendor-advisory: GHPR-erigontech-erigon-22859

vendor-advisory: GHPR-erigontech-erigon-22892

vendor-advisory: GHPR-erigontech-erigon-23150

vendor-advisory: GHPR-ethereum-go-ethereum-35544

related (Fault termination)

NRDAX-T0001 - Addr Message Counter Overflow Crash active NRDAX-T0005 - Array Deserialization Memcpy Corruption active NRDAX-T0013 - Bloom Filter Divide-By-Zero Crash active NRDAX-T0024 - Compact Block FillBlock Duplicate Crash active NRDAX-T0056 - Duplicate Input Validation-Bypass Crash active NRDAX-T0101 - Handshake Crypto Validation Bypass Crash active NRDAX-T0120 - Integer-Overflow Panic Control Message active NRDAX-T0122 - Integer Signedness Index OOB Crash active

cite

https://nrdax.com/techniques/NRDAX-T0171

plain

NRDAX Registry. Technique NRDAX-T0171.

bibtex

@misc{nrdax_NRDAX_T0171,
  title = {Nil Node Dereference Panic (NRDAX-T0171)},
  howpublished = {NRDAX Registry},
  url = {https://nrdax.com/techniques/NRDAX-T0171},
}

json (csl)

{
  "id": "nrdax-NRDAX-T0171",
  "type": "dataset",
  "title": "Nil Node Dereference Panic (NRDAX-T0171)",
  "URL": "https://nrdax.com/techniques/NRDAX-T0171",
  "publisher": "NRDAX Registry"
}

badge

[![NRDAX-T0171 in the NRDAX registry](https://nrdax.com/badge/NRDAX-T0171.svg)](https://nrdax.com/techniques/NRDAX-T0171-nil-node-dereference-panic)

use from the CLI

Retrieve or cite this technique from a script or the terminal with the NRDAX Python library & CLI.

Retrieve this technique

nrdax get NRDAX-T0171

Cite it (BibTeX)

nrdax cite NRDAX-T0171 --format bibtex

CLI guide → GitHub ↗