EIP-7702 Developer: EIP-7702 Itself Has No Vulnerability, But It Did Help the Hacker in the Binance Incident
Odaily Report: Derek Chiang, founder of ZeroDev and a developer involved with EIP-7702, posted on X stating that first, to be clear — EIP-7702 itself has no vulnerability. If you are using a wallet that supports EIP-7702 (MetaMask, Uniswap, Ambire, etc.), please do not panic.EIP-7702 is an Account Abstraction improvement proposal that allows externally owned accounts (EOAs) to sign a special message called a "7702 authorization," thereby embedding a smart contract into that account. This enables accounts to achieve powerful functionality, such as transaction batching — combining "authorization" and "transfer" into a single transaction, allowing you to complete a swap on Uniswap with just one click.Unfortunately, the same feature also allows hackers to efficiently transfer all your tokens in a single transaction. In the Binance hack incident, the hacker moved ETH, USDT, and 62 other tokens in one transaction, whereas without EIP-7702, they would have needed to send a separate transaction for each token. In this particular incident, many such transactions would have failed anyway, because Binance was still using the compromised wallet for withdrawals at the time, so all transactions sent by the hacker had to compete with legitimate transactions for Nonce (transaction sequence number). Therefore, using EIP-7702 did help the hacker steal funds as quickly and as extensively as possible.However, for the hacker to use EIP-7702, one of the following conditions must have been met: first, they obtained the private key; second, they tricked Binance into signing a 7702 authorization — the latter is highly unlikely, as it is hard to imagine Binance exposing an endpoint used for signing 7702 authorizations (or worse, signing raw messages that could be repackaged by the hacker for 7702 authorization). But until the official postmortem report is released, this possibility cannot be completely ruled out.Derek Chiang added: "As one of the contributors to account abstraction, I feel somewhat responsible for this hack incident, because while giving accounts more powerful functionality, we have indeed also given hackers stronger capabilities."