Cyber Resilience

CVE-2021-39216

Medium

Published: 17 September 2021

Published
17 September 2021
Modified
21 November 2024
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score v3.1 6.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0015 35.7th percentile
Risk Priority 13 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

CVE-2021-39216 is a medium-severity Use After Free (CWE-416) vulnerability in Fedoraproject Fedora. Its CVSS base score is 6.3 (Medium).

Operationally, ranked at the 35.7th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability details

Wasmtime is an open source runtime for WebAssembly & WASI. In Wasmtime from version 0.19.0 and before version 0.30.0 there was a use-after-free bug when passing `externref`s from the host to guest Wasm content. To trigger the bug, you have…

more

to explicitly pass multiple `externref`s from the host to a Wasm instance at the same time, either by passing multiple `externref`s as arguments from host code to a Wasm function, or returning multiple `externref`s to Wasm from a multi-value return function defined in the host. If you do not have host code that matches one of these shapes, then you are not impacted. If Wasmtime's `VMExternRefActivationsTable` became filled to capacity after passing the first `externref` in, then passing in the second `externref` could trigger a garbage collection. However the first `externref` is not rooted until we pass control to Wasm, and therefore could be reclaimed by the collector if nothing else was holding a reference to it or otherwise keeping it alive. Then, when control was passed to Wasm after the garbage collection, Wasm could use the first `externref`, which at this point has already been freed. We have reason to believe that the effective impact of this bug is relatively small because usage of `externref` is currently quite rare. The bug has been fixed, and users should upgrade to Wasmtime 0.30.0. If you cannot upgrade Wasmtime yet, you can avoid the bug by disabling reference types support in Wasmtime by passing `false` to `wasmtime::Config::wasm_reference_types`.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.

Affected Assets

bytecodealliance
wasmtime
0.19.0 — 0.30.0
fedoraproject
fedora
34, 35

Mitigating Controls

Likely Mitigating Controls AI

Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.

addresses: CWE-416

Use-after-free exploits that achieve arbitrary code execution are blocked or significantly hardened by non-executable pages and ASLR.

References