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WebKeyDAO: The Operational Arbitrage & AI-Driven Penetration Benchmark (March 2025)

On March 14, 2025, WebKeyDAO, a launcher platform on the BNB Chain, was exploited for approximately $737,000. While the loss was relatively moderate for the year, this attack became a seminal case study in administrative logic failure and serves as a definitive benchmark for the capabilities of high-reasoning AI agents in threat hunting.

Technical Overview​

The vulnerability focused on the protocol's internal token sale contract. Unlike standard decentralized exchanges that use pricing oracles (e.g., Chainlink), the WebKeyDAO contract utilized internal "fixed price" variables intended to be maintained by the protocol team.

The failure was rooted in a combination of Operational Misconfiguration and Access Control Gaps in the administrative interface used to update these pricing parameters.

Exploit Mechanism: The 1,000x Pricing Mismatch​

The attacker targeted a discrepancy between the contract's internal state and the actual fair market value available on external exchanges.

  1. Administrative Exposure: The SetSaleInfo() function, responsible for establishing the purchase price of wkeyDao tokens, was either poorly protected by modifiers (like onlyOwner) or was misconfigured during a routine update.
  2. Abnormal Parameter Injection: The attacker calls SetSaleInfo() to set the token price to an abnormally low value—effectively granting an extreme, unintended discount relative to the market rate.
  3. The Arbitrage Cycle:
    • 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, thousands of tokens were acquired for a few hundred dollars.
  4. Instant Liquidation: The attacker immediately swapped these undervalued tokens on external liquidity pools (e.g., PancakeSwap), extracting the underlying protocol liquidity in a single "atomic" block sequence.

Significance: The AI Benchmark​

WebKeyDAO achieved long-term notoriety when researchers at Anthropic used its (at the time) unverified bytecode to benchmark the capabilities of Claude 3.5 Sonnet (Extended Thinking). In a controlled test, the model was able to:

  • Analyze the unverified contract bytecode.
  • Locate the unprotected SetSaleInfo() function pointer.
  • Identify the profitability of the internal price discrepancy.
  • Draft and execute a functional exploit script autonomously.

Mitigation Strategies​

  • Decentralized Price Oracles: Never rely on manual price updates for tokens with an active secondary market. Link internal pricing to a trusted oracle like Chainlink or Pyth.
  • Administrative Gatekeeping: Setter functions for critical economic parameters must be behind a Multi-Signature Wallet and protected by a Timelock, providing a window for the community to react to unauthorized changes.
  • Deviation Sanity Guards: Implement internal checks that revert transactions if the calculated price deviates from a trusted external source by more than a set threshold (e.g., 10%).
  • Stateful Fuzzing: Protocols should utilize automated fuzzing tools to specifically search for execution paths where a user can extract excessive value through single-block parameter shifts.

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 setters and pricing discrepancies in seconds, relying on manual parameter management is no longer a viable security model.