Non-replay protected transactions cause JSON-RPC endpoints to crash

[m-Peter]

It was reported that the following JSON-RPC call:

curl -sX POST http://xxxx:8545/ -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{
"method": "eth_getBlockByNumber",
"params": ["0xEC7D3", true],
"jsonrpc": "2.0",
"id": 2
}' | jq

caused the respective endpoint to crash:

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": 2,
  "error": {
    "code": -32603,
    "message": "method handler crashed"
  }
}

Upon investigation, I found out that the root cause of this, was a contract deployment that used a pre-signed transaction: https://evm.flowscan.io/tx/0x07471adfe8f4ec553c1199f495be97fc8be8e0626ae307281c22534460184ed1 . This transaction didn't specify a chain ID, so that it could be used across EVM chains.

Due to the Geth changes for Pectra, a chain ID of 0 is no longer valid. And for such legacy transactions, the HomesteadSigner has to be used instead. See https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/blob/v1.16.1/core/types/transaction_signing.go#L379-L382 for more info.