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How to Verify a Signature in a Wrong Way — The AssociationNFT Case

Code Auditing
April 21, 2022
Image: Raymond Clarke/Flickr
Image: Raymond Clarke/Flickr

The Association NFT is a NBA launched NFT. However, we find the NFT sale contract has a serious vulnerability which allows an attacker to mint a large number NFTs, without paying any Tokens.

The root cause of the vulnerability is the incorrect use of signature verification. Basically, the contract fails to ensure that the signature can only be used by the user (and only the user) once. In this case, the attacker can reuse a privileged user’s signature and mint tokens to him/herself.

We can see that in the verify function, there is no sender's address in the signature. Besides, there is no mechanism to include a nonce to ensure that the signature can only be used once. These security requirements are the basic knowledge in the software security class.

We are surprised that how such a vulnerability can exist in a popular NFT project. The whole community needs to pay more attention to the security of the contract.

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Newsletter - August 2026
Security Insights

Newsletter - August 2026

During August 2026, three major DeFi security incidents caused significant losses. A balance-synchronization vulnerability in the Cosmos EVM module was exploited across six chains (~$14.8M). Moonwell on Base lost ~$9.1M to oracle price manipulation targeting the low-liquidity MAMO token. Term Finance on Ethereum suffered a ~$8.47M governance takeover enabled by near-zero voter participation.

~$10.26M Lost: Term Finance, MAYAChain | BlockSec Weekly
Security Insights

~$10.26M Lost: Term Finance, MAYAChain | BlockSec Weekly

During the week of August 17-23, 2026, two notable security incidents resulted in approximately $10.26M in total losses across Ethereum and MAYAChain. The highlighted Term Finance incident (~$8.5M) was a flawed governance design rather than a coding bug: each vault ships its own on-chain DAO whose support-threshold and participation checks are purely relative, with no absolute floor; with almost no one taking part in governance, there was no electorate to vote a proposal down and no guardian to cancel one, so an attacker acquired a supermajority of a vault's voting power for roughly 0.5 ETH and, after the execution delay elapsed, drained six of Term's vaults for approximately $8.5M in total. MAYAChain (~$1.76M) lost funds to a chain of accounting and state-validation defects, where a single crafted deposit made valid withdrawals appear to have failed, triggered a recovery path that inflated a low-liquidity pool's recorded native-token balance with no real backing, and let the attacker drain the inflated value by adding and withdrawing liquidity.

Harmony Cross-Shard ONE Mint + ~$47M Key Losses | BlockSec Weekly
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Harmony Cross-Shard ONE Mint + ~$47M Key Losses | BlockSec Weekly

During the week of August 10-16, 2026, 5 notable security incidents are featured, involving approximately $47M in quantified losses, with the detailed analysis focused on a chain-implementation flaw in the Harmony Layer-1. Harmony suffered unauthorized minting of native ONE through a cross-shard receipt replay: destination shards derived the receipt spent-marker from unauthenticated MerkleProof.ShardID and BlockNum fields instead of the signed source header, so an already-credited receipt could be replayed with no matching source-shard debit. Approximately 3.01T ONE was forged, but its nominal value far exceeds the token's market capitalization and is neither realizable nor confirmed realized loss, so Harmony is excluded from the total; the ~$47M came from private-key compromises (Unknown Whale Wallet ~$25M, Kite ~$14M, and Coinsbuy ~$7.9M) plus a Fox business-logic flaw (~$117K).

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How to Verify a Signature in a Wrong Way — The AssociationNFT Case