Wasmtime before 24.0.12, 25.0.0 before 36.0.13, 37.0.0 before 46.0.2, and 47.0.0 before 47.0.3 contains a type confusion vulnerability because several Store APIs fail to validate that objects belong to the Store's Engine. Embedders mixing objects between Engines via Instance::new, StructRefPre::new, or Tag::new can trigger trampoline signature mismatches causing out-of-bounds stack writes, GC heap corruption, or panics.

Wasmtime before 24.0.13, 25.0.0 before 36.0.14, 37.0.0 before 46.0.3, and 47.0.0 before 47.0.4 allows a filesystem sandbox escape in wasmtime-wasi because its cap-std dependency mishandles symlinks with trailing slashes on macOS and Linux kernels lacking openat2. A guest with write access to any sandboxed directory can read and write any host-accessible file, and read-only guests may read host files via preexisting symlinks.

Wasmtime 46.0.0 before 46.0.3 and 47.0.0 before 47.0.4 contains an uncontrolled resource allocation vulnerability in its WASIp3 implementation that buffers guest-specified-length writes on the host without limit. Malicious guests can offer large buffers to WASIp3 file or HTTP write streams, causing the host to copy and buffer all bytes, bounded only by guest linear memory, exhausting host memory.

Wasmtime 47.0.0 before 48.0.3 and 49.0.0 before 49.0.1 contains a fuel accounting flaw in Cranelift-compiled callref and trytable catch paths. Malicious guests can reset consumed fuel after calls to run exponentially long on linear fuel, evading timeouts and periodic yields for denial of service.

Wasmtime before 36.0.16, 37.0.0 before 48.0.3, and 49.0.0 before 49.0.1 does not adequately account for host allocations when lifting guest values through the dynamically-typed Val API, bypassing the hostcall fuel limit. A malicious WebAssembly guest can return crafted values that allocate at least ~100x more host memory than tracked, causing denial of service.

wasmtime-wasi-http in Wasmtime before 36.0.16, 37.0.0 before 48.0.3, and 49.0.0 before 49.0.1 does not enforce the wasi:io/streams check-write allowance for WASIp2 outgoing HTTP bodies, so oversized writes succeed instead of trapping. A malicious guest can pass large buffers to write on outgoing-body resources, holding host allocations for the store's lifetime and exhausting host memory.

Wasmtime before 36.0.16, 37.0.0 before 48.0.3, and 49.0.0 before 49.0.1 contains a denial of service vulnerability in wasmtime-wasi that allows guest WASI programs to panic the host via overflowing filesystem timestamps. Attackers can pass atim or mtim values whose sub-second field overflows the seconds field to pathfilestatsettimes, fdfilestatsettimes, set-times, or set-times-at, crashing the host.

Wasmtime before 36.0.17, 37.0.0 before 48.0.4, and 49.0.0 before 49.0.2 contains an information disclosure vulnerability in the WASIp1 fdreaddir implementation that copies uninitialized struct padding into guest memory. Guests with a preopened directory can list entries to receive three bytes of leftover host stack or heap memory per directory entry.

Wasmtime 46.0.0 before 48.0.4 and 49.0.0 before 49.0.2 contains a denial of service vulnerability in the wasmtime-wasi WASIp3 implementation that allows guests to abort the Unix host process. Guests with mutable preopened directory access can call set-times or set-times-at with negative seconds timestamps before the epoch, triggering an assertion failure that crashes the host.

Wasmtime 39.0.0 before 48.0.4 and 49.0.0 before 49.0.2 contains a stack buffer overflow vulnerability that allows malicious guests to write ~16KB to the native stack via unvalidated async callback result types. Attackers can supply components with mistyped component-model-async callback functions to overwrite return addresses, crashing the host or escaping the sandbox.

Wasmtime 47.0.0 before 48.0.4 and 49.0.0 before 49.0.2 contains an improper validation vulnerability that accepts components whose core modules import WebAssembly tags with a subtype of the original type. Malicious guests can mis-type exception object payloads to corrupt the GC heap, causing Wasmtime to panic when the exceptions proposal is enabled.

Wasmtime before 36.0.17, 37.0.0 before 48.0.4, and 49.0.0 before 49.0.2 contains an unbounded memory allocation in the wasmtime-wasi WASIp2 write-zeroes method of SinkOutputStream, the default stream used when stdout/stderr are not configured. A malicious WebAssembly guest can request huge zero-filled writes, exhausting host memory and causing denial of service.

Wasmtime 46.0.0 before 48.0.4 and 49.0.0 before 49.0.2 contains a denial-of-service vulnerability in its wasi:http implementation that allows guests to panic the host. Guests can specify a zero between-bytes-timeout request option, which is forwarded directly to a Tokio API that panics, crashing the host embedding.

Wasmtime before 36.0.17, 37.0.0 before 48.0.4, and 49.0.0 before 49.0.2 contains a denial of service vulnerability in the wasmtime-wasi WASI preview 0 polloneoff adapter, which performs O(n) host work per subscription without consuming or checking fuel. Malicious guest modules can pass many subscriptions to force long-running host computation that ignores configured fuel limits.

Wasmtime 47.0.0 before 48.0.4 and 49.0.0 before 49.0.2 contains a missing GC rooting vulnerability that leaves references live across trycall unrooted when compiling Wasm modules. Attackers can supply Wasm modules whose callee triggers garbage collection, leaving stale or dangling references that cause GC heap corruption or incorrect execution.

Impact

Wasmtime's Rust embedder API contains an unsound interaction where a WebAssembly shared linear memory could be viewed as a type which provides safe access to the host (Rust) to the contents of the linear memory. This is not sound for shared linear memories, which could be modified in parallel, and this could lead to a data race in the host.

Wasmtime has a wasmtime::Memory type which represents linear memories in a WebAssembly module. Wasmtime also has wasmtime::SharedMemory, however, which represents shared linear memories introduced in the WebAssembly threads proposal. The API of SharedMemory does not provide accessors which return &[u8] in Rust, for example, as that's not a sound type signature when other threads could be modifying memory. The wasmtime::Memory type, however, does provide this API as it's intended to be used with non-shared memories where static knowledge is available that no concurrent or parallel reads or writes are happening. This means that it's not sound to represent a shared linear memory with wasmtime::Memory and it must instead be represented with wasmtime::SharedMemory.

There were two different, erroneous, methods of creating a wasmtime::Memory which represents a shared memory however:

1. The wasmtime::Memory::new constructor takes a MemoryType which could be shared. This function did not properly reject shared memory types and require usage of SharedMemory::new instead. 2. Capturing a core dump with WebAssembly would expose all linear memories a wasmtime::Memory. This means that a core dump would perform an unsynchronized read of shared linear memory, possibly leading to data races.

This is a bug in Wasmtime's safe Rust API. It should not be possible to cause unsoundness with Wasmtime's embedding API if unsafe is not used. Embeddings which do not use the wasm threads proposal nor created shared memories nor actually share shared memories across threads are unaffected. Only if shared memories are created across threads might an embedding be affected.

Patches

Patch releases have been issued for all supported versions of Wasmtime, notably: 24.0.5, 36.0.3, 37.0.3, and 38.0.4. These releases reject creation of shared memories via Memory::new and shared memories are now excluded from core dumps.

Workarounds

Embeddings affected by this issue should use SharedMemory::new instead of Memory::new to create shared memories. Affected embeddings should also disable core dumps if they are unable to upgrade. Note that core dumps are disabled by default but the wasm threads proposal (and shared memory) is enabled by default. It's recommended to upgrade to a patched version of Wasmtime, however.

An out-of-bound memory read vulnerability was discovered in Bytecode Alliance wasm-micro-runtime v2.0.0 which allows a remote attacker to cause a denial of service via the "blocktypegetarity" function in core/iwasm/interpreter/wasm.h.

A heap buffer overflow vulnerability was discovered in Bytecode Alliance wasm-micro-runtime v2.0.0 which allows a remote attacker to cause at least a denial of service via the "wasmloadercheckbr" function in core/iwasm/interpreter/wasmloader.c.