Governance Attack Surface Review: Maple

Governance Attack Surface Review: Maple

Maple Finance is a popular lending protocol on Ethereum and various L2s, holding around $3.06 billion in total value locked (TVL). Its governance system, which controls important protocol parameters, upgrades, and MAPLE token treasury allocations, is the focus of this security audit.

The review examined smart contract code, governance UI/DAO tools, timelock and upgrade patterns, and off-chain governance processes like snapshot voting and multi-signature approvals. Key vulnerabilities were identified across several categories:

1. Timelock & Upgradeability:

- ProxyAdmin with a 24-hour timelock can be re-initialized maliciously

- Timelock delay can be set to zero, removing the safety window

- Upgradeable libraries lack timelock protection for admin actions

2. Proposal Execution Race / Re-entrancy:

- Execute() function fails to verify proposal state after timelock

- Allows front-running to double-spend treasury withdrawals

3. Vote Weight Manipulation:

- Stake/unstake actions can be performed within the same block

- Flash-stake attacks can inflate voting power

- Delegation can be rotated to meet quorum across multiple proposals

4. Delegatecall Abuse:

- Targets iterate over external library contracts without checks

- Could redirect treasury withdrawals to attacker-controlled addresses

5. Off-Chain Signature Replay:

- Meta-transaction signatures lack chain-id and nonce, allowing replay on forks

With an overall risk score of 8/10, the governance layer presents a significant security risk. A successful attack could grant full protocol control, drain the treasury, or result in permanent loss of user funds. Immediate mitigation of these upgradeability and timelock weaknesses is critical to safeguarding Maple's integrity and user assets.