CVE-2022-39392
Published: 10 November 2022
Summary
CVE-2022-39392 is a medium-severity Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer (CWE-119) vulnerability in Bytecodealliance Wasmtime. Its CVSS base score is 5.9 (Medium).
Operationally, ranked in the top 38.5% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2022-7220
Vulnerability details
Wasmtime is a standalone runtime for WebAssembly. Prior to version 2.0.2, there is a bug in Wasmtime's implementation of its pooling instance allocator when the allocator is configured to give WebAssembly instances a maximum of zero pages of memory. In…
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this configuration, the virtual memory mapping for WebAssembly memories did not meet the compiler-required configuration requirements for safely executing WebAssembly modules. Wasmtime's default settings require virtual memory page faults to indicate that wasm reads/writes are out-of-bounds, but the pooling allocator's configuration would not create an appropriate virtual memory mapping for this meaning out of bounds reads/writes can successfully read/write memory unrelated to the wasm sandbox within range of the base address of the memory mapping created by the pooling allocator. This bug is not applicable with the default settings of the `wasmtime` crate. This bug can only be triggered by setting `InstanceLimits::memory_pages` to zero. This is expected to be a very rare configuration since this means that wasm modules cannot allocate any pages of linear memory. All wasm modules produced by all current toolchains are highly likely to use linear memory, so it's expected to be unlikely that this configuration is set to zero by any production embedding of Wasmtime. This bug has been patched and users should upgrade to Wasmtime 2.0.2. This bug can be worked around by increasing the `memory_pages` allotment when configuring the pooling allocator to a value greater than zero. If an embedding wishes to still prevent memory from actually being used then the `Store::limiter` method can be used to dynamically disallow growth of memory beyond 0 bytes large. Note that the default `memory_pages` value is greater than zero.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.
Affected Assets
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.
Memory protections (e.g., W^X, ASLR) make exploitation of buffer-boundary violations far harder to turn into code execution.
Ongoing control assessments and code testing (static/dynamic analysis, fuzzing) surface memory buffer restriction failures, which are then remediated before release.
Managed runtimes used by platform-independent applications (e.g., JVM, CLR) enforce memory safety, preventing most buffer overflows that require direct memory manipulation.
Detects exploitation attempts that produce memory corruption, crashes, or anomalous behavior.