This is Part 7 of the “Let’s play EVM Puzzles” series, where I will explain how to solve each puzzle challenge.
EVM Puzzles is a project developed by Franco Victorio (@fvictorio_nan) that a perfect fit if you are in the process of learning how the Ethereum EVM works and you want to apply some of the knowledge you have just acquired.
EVM Puzzle 7
00 36 CALLDATASIZE
01 6000 PUSH1 00
03 80 DUP1
04 37 CALLDATACOPY
05 36 CALLDATASIZE
06 6000 PUSH1 00
08 6000 PUSH1 00
0A F0 CREATE
0B 3B EXTCODESIZE
0C 6001 PUSH1 01
0E 14 EQ
0F 6013 PUSH1 13
11 57 JUMPI
12 FD REVERT
13 5B JUMPDEST
14 00 STOP
This challenge introduces some new opcode and more complexity. Let's review each new opcode and try to break down everything in blocks:
- CALLDATACOPY: pop 3 values from the stack as inputs and copy the calldata value from the transaction data to the memory
- input1
destOffset
: byte offset in memory where the result of the copy operation will be copied to - input2
offset
: byte offset in the calldata from which you want to start to copy from - input3
size
: byte size of the data from calldata you intend to copy in memory
- input1
- CREATE: deploy a new contract. It pops 3 values from the stack to use as input of the deployment operation. The result of the operation is the address of the deployed contract that is pushed to the stack.
- input1
value
: value in way to send to the new account - input2
offset
: byte offset from where you want to start copy the new contract's code from the memory - input3:
size
: byte size of instruction to copy starting from the memory offset
- input1
- EXTCODESIZE: Pop a value from the stack to be used as a 20-byte address. The address will be used to "query" the destination contract and get as the result the byte size of the contract's code. The result is pushed back to the stack
Let's try to understand what all those opcodes do when executed.
Block 1: Copy the whole calldata input in memory
00 36 CALLDATASIZE
01 6000 PUSH1 00
03 80 DUP1
04 37 CALLDATACOPY
The CALLDATACOPY
is like a "special" MLOAD that take the data to be stored in the memory directly from the calldata location.
Those instructions are saying: take all the data from calldata and copy it to the memory starting from the memory position 0.
Block 2: Create a new contract, its code will be the equal to the calldata data
After the execution of ops from "Block 1" we have our calldata data inside memory starting from position 0.
05 36 CALLDATASIZE
06 6000 PUSH1 00
08 6000 PUSH1 00
0A F0 CREATE
These opcodes are just saying: create a new contract transferring 0 wei
with the transaction. The code to deploy the new contract will be the one in memory that goes from offset 0
to CALLDATASIZE
bytes.
So connecting Block 1 and Block 2 the result is this: use the calldata data in input to use it as the code to deploy a new contract.
Block 3: Make it jump!
0B 3B EXTCODESIZE
0C 6001 PUSH1 01
0E 14 EQ
0F 6013 PUSH1 13
11 57 JUMPI
EXTCODESIZE
get the size in bytes of the deployed contract and add it to the stack. After that, the puzzle check that the size of the deployed contract is equal to the value 1. If so, we follow the JUMPI
to the position 13
and we win the challenge.
The solution is to find a calldata
value for which the result of EXTCODESIZE
(done on the contract deployed with code from the calldata
itself) return 1.
Solution
What's the correct calldata
to pass to the transaction to
- make the contract successfully deploy via
CREATE
- return 1 when
EXTCODESIZE
is executed
Let's find out how CREATE
work:
As we saw from the OpenZeppelin blog post "# Deconstructing a Solidity Contract — Part II: Creation vs. Runtime"
[...] The creation code gets executed in a transaction, which returns a copy of the runtime code, which is the actual code of the contract. As we will see, the constructor is part of the creation code, and not part of the runtime code. The contract’s constructor is part of the creation code; it will not be present in the contract’s code once it is deployed.
When the CREATE
opcode is executed, only the code returned by the RETURN
opcode will be the "runtime code" that will be executed in the future when the deployed contract will be called. The other part of the bytecode is just used once, only for the constructor
part.
Our calldata
can have all the code we want inside, but we need to make it sure that the returned code (runtime code) has only 1 instruction, so EXTCODESIZE
will return 1 (byte).
Let's see how the RETURN opcode works: it pops 2 values from the stack to use them as input for:
- memory offset from where to start to read
- memory size in bytes to read and return
Whatever it's in memory, we want to return only 1 instruction that is 1 byte. Our goal is to execute RETURN(offset=0, size=1)
.
Let's make an example where we want our deployed smart contract to have only the STOP
instruction (opcode 00
). The code that must be sent to the CREATE
opcode would be like this
PUSH1 00 // 00 is the opcode for STOP
PUSH1 00 // this will be used as the offset of MSTORE8 that store 1 byte in memory
MSTORE8 // will store in memory from offset 0 the `00` value (from the first PUSH1)
PUSH1 01 // how many bytes must be returned
PUSH1 00 // from which memory offset return those bytes
RETURN
That translated in bytecode is 600060005360016000F3
.
So if we pass 600160005360016000F3
as the calldata of our puzzle, it will use that calldata to create and deploy a new contract that will have a runtime code of just 00
: the STOP
opcode!
Here's the link to the solution of Puzzle 7 on EVM Codes website to simulate it.