EscrowService.refund and poolWithdraw bypass withLockedEscrow, so a concurrent refund and release both pass the LOCKED check and both move funds
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Assessment
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 58/100
- Issue type
- Bug
- Clarity
- Clearly specified
- Activity status
- Active
- Tech stack
- postgresql, typescript
Research direction
Read src/escrow/escrow.service.ts, especially refund, poolWithdraw, and withLockedEscrow, then inspect the related transaction patterns in release and releasePartial. Check the callers mentioned in src/milestones/milestones.service.ts and src/escrow/escrow.service.spec.ts. Done means both fund moving methods serialize on the escrow row and save their ledger changes through the transaction manager, with tests covering those behaviors.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Location
src/escrow/escrow.service.ts:440—EscrowService.refundsrc/escrow/escrow.service.ts:407—EscrowService.poolWithdraw- compare
src/escrow/escrow.service.ts:484—withLockedEscrow
Problem
The pessimistic row lock added for #303 was applied to three of the five fund-moving methods. release, splitRelease and releasePartial all route through withLockedEscrow, which takes SELECT ... FOR UPDATE on the escrow row and asserts the LOCKED precondition under that lock:
const escrow = await mgr.findOne(Escrow, {
where: { id: escrowId },
lock: { mode: 'pessimistic_write' },
});
if (!escrow) throw new NotFoundException(...);
this.assertLocked(escrow);
return fn(escrow, mgr);
refund and poolWithdraw do not. Both still use the unlocked read-then-check-then-write pattern the lock was introduced to eliminate:
async refund(escrowId: string): Promise<Escrow> {
const escrow = await this.getOrThrow(escrowId); // plain findOne, no lock
this.assertLocked(escrow); // check on an unlocked read
const result = await this.invokeOnLockedEscrow(escrow, 'refund', () => ...);
escrow.status = EscrowStatus.REFUNDED;
...
return this.escrowRepo.save(escrow); // save() on a possibly-stale entity
}
getOrThrow (line 463) is a bare escrowRepo.findOne({ where: { id } }) with no lock option and no transaction.
Why it matters
The lock in withLockedEscrow only serialises callers that take it. A refund holds no lock, so it is invisible to a concurrent release and vice versa:
release(E)opens its transaction, locks rowE, readsstatus = LOCKED, and begins its on-chainreleaseinvocation. The row lock is held until that transaction commits — and it spans the whole Soroban round trip, whichIdempotencyInterceptor's 90s stale window (#90) tells us can take tens of seconds.- Meanwhile
refund(E)reads rowEwithout the lock.SELECTwithoutFOR UPDATEis not blocked by another transaction's row lock in Postgres under the default READ COMMITTED isolation — it reads the last committed version, which still saysLOCKED. assertLockedpasses.refundinvokes the contract'srefundfor the same escrow key.- Both on-chain calls are now in flight for one escrow: the full amount to the recipient and the full amount back to the funder.
Then the ledger diverges regardless of which on-chain call wins:
refundfinishes withthis.escrowRepo.save(escrow)on the entity it read beforereleasecommitted. TypeORM'ssaveissues a full-columnUPDATE, so it overwritesrelease'sstatus = RELEASED,releaseTxHashandreleasedAtwith the stale pre-release values plusREFUNDED. ThePaymentrow written byreleasesurvives, so the escrow readsREFUNDEDwhile a confirmed full-amountPaymentexists against it — the exact double-accounting #154 and #303 were meant to close.
On a correctly-implemented contract one of the two on-chain calls would fail, which bounds the loss — but the local ledger is corrupted either way, and in dry-run mode (SorobanClientService.invoke succeeding unconditionally) both "succeed" and the double payout is recorded as real. The same unlocked-read problem applies to poolWithdraw, which additionally runs concurrently with itself by design (a pool stays LOCKED across many rewards) and which MaintenancePoolService.assignReward is the sole caller of.
refund is reachable from three places, so this is not a narrow window: POST /escrow/:id/refund, BountiesService.refund (src/bounties/bounties.service.ts:270), and MilestonesService.close (src/milestones/milestones.service.ts:272). A merged-PR payout racing a sponsor's refund of the same bounty is a realistic sequence, not a contrived one — the bounty state machine permits MERGED -> REFUNDED (src/bounties/bounty-state-machine.ts:32-36).
Reproduction / failure path
- Fund a bounty:
POST /bounties→B,POST /bounties/B/fund→ escrowE,status = LOCKED. - Claim it and merge the PR so
BreachesMERGED. - Fire two requests concurrently (or add an artificial delay inside
soroban.invoketo widen the window):POST /escrow/E/releasewith{ "recipientAddress": "G...C" }POST /escrow/E/refund
- Both return
200.Paymenthas a confirmed row for the full amount toG...C, andE.statusisREFUNDEDwithreleaseTxHash/releasedAtcleared byrefund's stalesave(). - Reversing the order gives the mirror image:
E.status = RELEASEDwith arefundTxHashwritten and then clobbered.
Serialising the two requests produces the correct 400 Escrow E is not in LOCKED state on the second, which confirms the only thing missing is the lock.
Suggested fix
Route both methods through the existing helper, exactly as release does:
async refund(escrowId: string): Promise<Escrow> {
return this.withLockedEscrow(escrowId, async (escrow, manager) => {
const result = await this.invokeOnLockedEscrow(
escrow, 'refund',
() => this.soroban.invoke('refund', [u64(this.onChainKeyFor(escrow))], this.contractOpts(escrow)),
manager,
);
escrow.status = EscrowStatus.REFUNDED;
escrow.refundTxHash = result.txHash;
escrow.refundedAt = new Date();
return manager.save(Escrow, escrow);
});
}
and for poolWithdraw, take the lock and write the Payment through the transaction manager (manager.save(Payment, ...)) instead of this.paymentRepo.save(...), so the withdraw and its ledger row are one atomic span.
Add an optional manager?: EntityManager passthrough on refund so MilestonesService.close can bring it into its own transaction, mirroring releasePartial's signature.
Tests to add in src/escrow/escrow.service.spec.ts: assert that refund and poolWithdraw call findOne with lock: { mode: 'pessimistic_write' } (the release specs already assert this shape), and that both write through the transaction manager rather than the bare repository.
- Dominant language
- TypeScript
- Stars
- 2
- Forks
- 90
- Avg merge
- 31m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 20
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