A bug in the SmallVec::insert_many method caused it to allocate a buffer that was smaller than needed. It then wrote past the end of the buffer, causing a buffer overflow and memory corruption on the heap.

This bug was only triggered if the iterator passed to insert_many yielded more items than the lower bound returned from its size_hint method.

The flaw was corrected in smallvec 0.6.14 and 1.6.1, by ensuring that additional space is always reserved for each item inserted. The fix also simplified the implementation of insert_many to use less unsafe code, so it is easier to verify its correctness.

Thank you to Yechan Bae (@Qwaz) and the Rust group at Georgia Tech’s SSLab for finding and reporting this bug.

In affected versions, after a Report is constructed using wrap_err or wrap_err_with to attach a message of type D onto an error of type E, then using downcast to recover ownership of either the value of type D or the value of type E, one of two things can go wrong:

• If downcasting to E, there remains a value of type D to be dropped. It is incorrectly "dropped" by running E's drop behavior, rather than D's. For example if D is &str and E is std::io::Error, there would be a call of std::io::Error::drop in which the reference received by the Drop impl does not refer to a valid value of type std::io::Error, but instead to &str.

• If downcasting to D, there remains a value of type E to be dropped. When D and E do not happen to be the same size, E's drop behavior is incorrectly executed in the wrong location. The reference received by the Drop impl may point left or right of the real E value that is meant to be getting dropped.

In both cases, when the Report contains an error E that has nontrivial drop behavior, the most likely outcome is memory corruption.

When the Report contains an error E that has trivial drop behavior (for example a Utf8Error) but where D has nontrivial drop behavior (such as String), the most likely outcome is that downcasting to E would leak D.