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ChainSecurity’s historical audit of a Curve ETH/sETH pool reported one medium-severity reentrancy finding involving owner privileges. The report says additional guards corrected it in the assessed code, but it does not establish the security of Curve DEX today: it covered specific source versions, excluded DAO security, and assumed the LP token had proper access controls.
What did the Curve ETH/sETH audit examine?
ChainSecurity’s Code Assessment of the Curve ETH/sETH Smart Contracts is dated September 27, 2021. Its assessment overview identifies a StableSwapETH.vy contract in the Curve ETH/sETH repository and lists two reviewed source versions: an initial version dated November 2, 2020, at commit 8ad854eb6c1e95ffb4fc375d4359d4e140569d5a, and an updated version dated December 15, 2020, at commit 2428dd6c809a3e5bcf31285e3deb5c68eda4e55e. The report date and those source-version dates refer to different things.
The findings and fixes below describe that assessment and its code versions. They should not be read as an audit of every Curve pool, every later contract, or the protocol’s current deployments.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchWhat was the reentrancy issue?
ChainSecurity titled its medium finding “Reentrancies.” It described two paths involving ETH transfers and calls to donate_admin_fees. Both required owner privileges; the finding was not described as an unrestricted public-caller exploit.
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Liquidity removal and fee donation
In one scenario, a callback during liquidity removal could reach an admin-fee donation while the tokens being removed were still held by the contract. The reentrant operation could update internal ERC-20 balances before those tokens had left the contract, breaking an invariant after the transaction.
Admin-fee withdrawal
In the other scenario, reentry during an admin-fee withdrawal could produce inconsistent handling across coins: fees for some coins could be donated while fees for others were withdrawn.
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The report also noted that certain admin functions lacked reentrancy protection and that callbacks could lead to incorrectly ordered events. It records additional reentrancy guards—including coverage for donate_admin_fees and apply_new_fee—as the correction. That is the report’s disposition for the assessed code, not confirmation that the same correction is present in every deployed or later version.
What access did the assessed contract give its administrator?
The report calls the owner the administrator and lists actions reserved to that role. These functions describe the authority model of the reviewed contract, not a universal permissions list for Curve deployments.
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- Start or stop changes to the amplification parameter.
- Commit, apply, or revert fee changes.
- Transfer ownership through a commit-and-apply process.
- Withdraw or donate admin fees.
- Freeze or unfreeze the contract.
This matters when interpreting the finding: the reentrancy scenarios depended on privileged operations. That narrows who could trigger the described paths, but does not make the underlying callback ordering irrelevant. Assessing the practical risk for a deployment also requires knowing who controls the administrator role and how that authority is protected.
What did the report leave out?
ChainSecurity’s conclusions had explicit boundaries. It treated sETH and the LP token as regular ERC-20 tokens, assumed proper access control for the LP token, and excluded the security of the DAO that could perform pool-admin operations. It also said the underlying mathematical formulas had been checked separately.
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Those assumptions mean the report did not independently establish the safety of LP-token permissions, DAO controls, or the formulas. Its scope limits also prevent using the pool review alone to characterize the security of the wider protocol.
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Other historical reviews covered separate governance components. Their findings should not be combined into a single Curve DEX score or treated as evidence about the ETH/sETH pool.
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| Assessment | Subsystem and source identity | Reported evidence | How to interpret it |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChainSecurity, report dated September 27, 2021 | Curve ETH/sETH StableSwapETH.vy; source versions dated November 2 and December 15, 2020, with commits identified above. |
0 critical, 0 high, 1 medium, and 5 low findings. The report says the medium finding and three low findings were corrected; two low findings were risk accepted. | Counts and dispositions apply to this assessment and its version history, not Curve DEX overall. |
| Trail of Bits, engagement dated June 22–July 10, 2020 | Curve DAO contracts at a specified repository commit; the available summary does not state the commit hash. | The Curve-hosted search-result summary reports 21 findings, from high to informational. It highlights incorrect LiquidityGauge bonus updating that could allow unfair interest, documentation and readability concerns, possible out-of-gas risks, external risk from Aragon contracts, and recommendations concerning deployment, early-user interactions, alternative voting contracts, and economic incentives. |
This is a separate DAO assessment. Detailed finding language should be taken from the report itself, not inferred from its summary. |
| Curve DAO Voting audit | Voting.sol, audited commit a988e7c9a0543b58f0f0adb93a7b06acd5b36c0c. |
The report excerpt lists no critical, major, or warning findings under its classification, while recording comments and recommendations and identifying fixes for reported issues. | Its classification applies to that voting contract and report; it is not a finding-free conclusion about Curve as a whole. |
| Curve DAO Voting Forwarder audit | BalanceTimeForwarder.sol, audited commit db6a2694bdc34d68bf39435ae956dea0791291d6. |
Identifies a possible reentrant call because lastVoteTimes was changed after runScript; moving the state update before the call was recorded as fixed at commit 031d29f. The report also notes an input-validation concern in initialize. |
This is a governance-forwarder issue, separate from the pool’s admin-fee paths. |
What can a reader conclude about current Curve security?
These reports document findings in named components and particular source revisions. They do not establish whether those revisions correspond to current deployed addresses, whether subsequent code retained the reported fixes, or what administrator and DAO roles control current deployments. Curve’s Knowledge Hub describes the protocol as supporting swaps and liquidity provision and provides documentation for developers and users, but that broad description does not identify which contracts or deployments a present-day security assessment should include.
To assess a specific deployment, first define the pool or governance component in scope. Then map its deployed address to verified source and a commit, inspect the current administrator and DAO roles, and check the relevant code for the historical fixes. Without that deployment mapping, the historical audit is useful evidence about its reviewed code—not a current security verdict.
How much assurance does an audit provide?
ChainSecurity cautions that assessments cannot uncover every vulnerability and that even an assessment with no findings is not a guarantee of security. Its report also says risk depends on likelihood and impact and that every finding should be checked regardless of severity. A severity label or a recorded correction is therefore a scoped assessment result, not proof that a system is safe.
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