CVE-2022-23636 - CVE House
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Status published Medium CVE-2022-23636

Invalid drop of partially-initialized instances in wasmtime

Vulnerability Description

Wasmtime is an open source runtime for WebAssembly & WASI. Prior to versions 0.34.1 and 0.33.1, there exists a bug in the pooling instance allocator in Wasmtime's runtime where a failure to instantiate an instance for a module that defines an `externref` global will result in an invalid drop of a `VMExternRef` via an uninitialized pointer. A number of conditions listed in the GitHub Security Advisory must be true in order for an instance to be vulnerable to this issue. Maintainers believe that the effective impact of this bug is relatively small because the usage of `externref` is still uncommon and without a resource limiter configured on the `Store`, which is not the default configuration, it is only possible to trigger the bug from an error returned by `mprotect` or `VirtualAlloc`. Note that on Linux with the `uffd` feature enabled, it is only possible to trigger the bug from a resource limiter as the call to `mprotect` is skipped. The bug has been fixed in 0.34.1 and 0.33.1 and users are encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible. If it is not possible to upgrade to version 0.34.1 or 0.33.1 of the `wasmtime` crate, it is recommend that support for the reference types proposal be disabled by passing `false` to `Config::wasm_reference_types`. Doing so will prevent modules that use `externref` from being loaded entirely.

Impact Analysis

Refer to official advisory for detailed impact metrics.

Remediation

Ensure systems are updated to the latest vendor-supplied patch levels.

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Credits & Attribution

No credits recorded in the NVD database.

Affected Vendor

bytecodealliance

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Affected Software

wasmtime
Vulnerable Versions:
< 0.33.0, = 0.34.0

Timeline

Official Publish: February 16th, 2022
Last Modified: April 23rd, 2025
Added to House: July 21st, 2026

CVSS Vectors

V3: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Weaknesses (CWE)