GHSA-qhr6-mgqr-mchm
Vyper's `concat()` builtin may elide side-effects for zero-length arguments
Packages
Details
As written in the advisory (Markdown source, shown as plain text).
### Impact
`concat()` may skip evaluation of side effects when the length of an argument is zero. this is due to a fastpath in the implementation which skips evaluation of argument expressions when their length is zero:
https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/blob/68b68c4b30c5ef2f312b4674676170b8a6eaa316/vyper/builtins/functions.py#L560-L562
in practice, it would be very unusual in user code to construct zero-length bytestrings using an expression with side-effects, since zero-length bytestrings are typically constructed with the empty literal `b""`; the only way to construct an empty bytestring which has side effects would be with the ternary operator introduced in v0.3.8, e.g. `b"" if self.do_some_side_effect() else b""`.
the following example demonstrates how the issue would look in user code
```vyper
counter: public(uint256)
@external
def test() -> Bytes[256]:
a: Bytes[256] = concat(b"" if self.sideeffect() else b"", b"aaaa")
return a
def sideeffect() -> bool:
self.counter += 1
return True
```
the severity assigned is low, since, as mentioned, this would be a very unusual pattern in user-code.
### Patches
fix is tracked in https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/pull/4644
### Workarounds
don't have side effects in expressions which construct zero-length bytestrings.
### References
_Are there any links users can visit to find out more?_
References
External links from the advisory. They lead to third-party sites.
- https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/security/advisories/GHSA-qhr6-mgqr-mchm
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-47285
- https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/pull/4644
- https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper
- https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/blob/68b68c4b30c5ef2f312b4674676170b8a6eaa316/vyper/builtins/functions.py#L560-L562