The implementation of impl Follow for bool allows to reinterpret arbitrary bytes as a bool.

In Rust bool has stringent requirements for its in-memory representation. Use of this function allows to violate these requirements and invoke undefined behaviour in safe code.

The read_scalar and read_scalar_at functions are unsound because they allow transmuting values without unsafe blocks.

The following example shows how to create a dangling reference:

fn main() {
    #[derive(Copy, Clone, PartialEq, Debug)]
    struct S(&'static str);
    impl flatbuffers::EndianScalar for S {
        fn to_little_endian(self) -> Self { self }
        fn from_little_endian(self) -> Self { self }
    }
    println!("{:?}", flatbuffers::read_scalar::<S>(&[1; std::mem::size_of::<S>()]));
}

Impact

Unix-like operating systems may segfault due to dereferencing a dangling pointer in specific circumstances. This requires an environment variable to be set in a different thread than the affected functions. This may occur without the user's knowledge, notably in a third-party library.

Workarounds

No workarounds are known.

References

• time-rs/time#293

Code generated by flatbuffers' compiler is unsafe but not marked as such. See https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/issues/6627 for details.

For example, if generated code is used to decode malformed or untrusted input, undefined behavior (and thus security vulnerabilities) is possible even without the use of the unsafe keyword, violating the the meaning of "safe" code;

All users that use generated code by flatbuffers compiler are recommended to:

1. not expose flatbuffer generated code as part of their public APIs
2. audit their code and look for any usage of follow, push, or any method that uses them (e.g. self_follow).
3. Carefully go through the crates' documentation to understand which "safe" APIs are not intended to be used.

The Rust Security Response WG was notified that the regex crate did not properly limit the complexity of the regular expressions (regex) it parses. An attacker could use this security issue to perform a denial of service, by sending a specially crafted regex to a service accepting untrusted regexes. No known vulnerability is present when parsing untrusted input with trusted regexes.

This issue has been assigned CVE-2022-24713. The severity of this vulnerability is "high" when the regex crate is used to parse untrusted regexes. Other uses of the regex crate are not affected by this vulnerability.

Overview

The regex crate features built-in mitigations to prevent denial of service attacks caused by untrusted regexes, or untrusted input matched by trusted regexes. Those (tunable) mitigations already provide sane defaults to prevent attacks. This guarantee is documented and it's considered part of the crate's API.

Unfortunately a bug was discovered in the mitigations designed to prevent untrusted regexes to take an arbitrary amount of time during parsing, and it's possible to craft regexes that bypass such mitigations. This makes it possible to perform denial of service attacks by sending specially crafted regexes to services accepting user-controlled, untrusted regexes.

Affected versions

All versions of the regex crate before or equal to 1.5.4 are affected by this issue. The fix is include starting from regex 1.5.5.

Mitigations

We recommend everyone accepting user-controlled regexes to upgrade immediately to the latest version of the regex crate.

Unfortunately there is no fixed set of problematic regexes, as there are practically infinite regexes that could be crafted to exploit this vulnerability. Because of this, we do not recommend denying known problematic regexes.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Addison Crump for responsibly disclosing this to us according to the Rust security policy, and for helping review the fix.

We also want to thank Andrew Gallant for developing the fix, and Pietro Albini for coordinating the disclosure and writing this advisory.