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WebKeyDAO: The Operational Arbitrage & Access Control Failure (March 2025)

On March 14, 2025, WebKeyDAO, a launcher platform on the BNB Chain, was exploited for approximately $737,000. While the loss was moderate compared to other 2025 incidents, this exploit has become an industry benchmark for AI-driven vulnerability detection and the danger of misconfigured administrative parameters.

Technical Overview​

The vulnerability centered on the protocol's token sale contract. Unlike standard decentralized exchanges that use pricing oracles, the WebKeyDAO contract utilized internal "fixed price" variables intended to be maintained by protocol admins.

The core failure was twofold: Operational Misconfiguration and Access Control Gaps in the administrative interface.

Exploit Mechanism: The 1,000x Discount​

The attacker capitalized on a mismatch between the contract's internal pricing and the fair market value available on external DEXs.

  1. Administrative Exposure: The SetSaleInfo() function, responsible for establishing the purchase price of wkeyDao tokens, was either unprotected by proper onlyOwner modifiers or was misconfigured during an operational update.
  2. Abnormal Parameter Injection: The attacker (or a high-reasoning AI agent) identified that the price could be set to an abnormally low value—effectively granting an extreme discount relative to the market rate.
  3. The "Buy" Loop:
    • With the discounted price active, the attacker utilized the buy() function to acquire a massive volume of tokens for a negligible amount of BUSD.
    • In one documented sequence, the attacker purchased 230 wkeyDao tokens for a mere 1,159 BUSD.
  4. Instant Liquidation: The attacker immediately swapped these undervalued tokens on external liquidity pools (e.g., PancakeSwap), extracting the underlying protocol value in a single block.

Wider Significance: The AI Benchmark​

WebKeyDAO gained industry notoriety when Anthropic researchers used it to benchmark Claude 3.5 Sonnet (Extended Thinking). In a controlled test, the model was able to:

  • Deconstruct unverified contract bytecode to identify the unprotected setter.
  • Identify the profitability of the buy() function relative to external market states.
  • Draft and execute a functional exploit script autonomously.

Mitigation Strategies​

  • Dynamic Price Oracles: Never rely on manual price updates for tokens with an active secondary market. Use Chainlink or Pyth to ensure internal prices track fair market value.
  • Administrative Multisigs & Timelocks: Critical setters like SetSaleInfo must be behind a Multi-Signature Wallet and protected by a Timelock, providing a window for the community to react to malicious parameter changes.
  • Automatic Deviation Guards: Implement sanity checks that revert transactions if the internal price deviates from a trusted external source by more than a set threshold (e.g., 10%).
  • Regression Fuzzing: Protocols should utilize stateful fuzzing to detect "Abnormal Profit" paths where a user can extract significant value via parameter manipulation.

Conclusion​

The WebKeyDAO heist is a warning that simple logic is the softest target for automation. In an era where AI agents can scan the blockchain for unprotected function pointers and pricing discrepancies in seconds, relying on manual parameter management is no longer a viable security model.