Vulnerability GHSA-897f-g5gm-fmxm

Critical
CRITICAL RISK
CVSS Score: 9.9
Score Range: 9.0–10.0
Critical severity vulnerabilities (CVSS 9.0–10.0). These represent the highest impact issues.
7 days ago
October 23, 2026 at 10:02 PM UTC
Wasmtime: Bit-packing in Cranelift compiler causes silent overflow and miscompilation
0.0.0 - 36.0.18 and 37.0.0 - 42.0.2
0.0.0 - 36.0.18 and 37.0.0 - 42.0.2

Summary

Wasmtime: Bit-packing in Cranelift compiler causes silent overflow and miscompilation

Details

Summary

In Wasmtime prior to v43, the Cranelift compiler backend bit-packs its SSA value indices in a way that can result in silent overflow in release builds, and result in incorrect value references in the IR resulting in arbitrary miscompilation. A very large Wasm function body, or one that is specially crafted to use many SSA values, can use this to force type-confusion or other arbitrary side-effects and escape the sandbox.

Cranelift was changed in Wasmtime v43 to use a full u32 index, with checks if that limit is exceeded, and so is no longer susceptible to this bug.

Impact

A Wasmtime engine with default settings (using the Cranelift backend) on any architecture/platform could experience a sandbox escape from a specially-crafted Wasm module.

Patches

Wasmtime v36.0.19 has been released which fixes this issue.

Impacted packages

Timeline

Published
7 days ago
October 23, 2026 at 10:02 PM UTC
Fixed (43.0.0)
7 months ago
March 20, 2026 at 06:05 AM UTC
Fixed (36.0.19)
11 days ago
October 19, 2026 at 07:05 PM UTC
Last Modified
7 days ago
October 23, 2026 at 10:25 PM UTC