Impact

The affected functions set environment variables without synchronization. On Unix-like operating systems, this can crash in multithreaded programs. Programs may segfault due to dereferencing a dangling pointer if an environment variable is read in a different thread than the affected functions. This may occur without the user's knowledge, notably in the Rust standard library or third-party libraries.

The affected functions from time 0.2.7 through 0.2.22 are:

• time::UtcOffset::local_offset_at
• time::UtcOffset::try_local_offset_at
• time::UtcOffset::current_local_offset
• time::UtcOffset::try_current_local_offset
• time::OffsetDateTime::now_local
• time::OffsetDateTime::try_now_local

The affected functions in time 0.1 (all versions) are:

• time::at_utc
• time::at
• time::now
• time::tzset

Non-Unix targets (including Windows and wasm) are unaffected.

Patches

Pending a proper fix, the internal method that determines the local offset has been modified to always return None on the affected operating systems. This has the effect of returning an Err on the try_* methods and UTC on the non-try_* methods.

Users and library authors with time in their dependency tree should perform cargo update, which will pull in the updated, unaffected code.

Users of time 0.1 do not have a patch and should upgrade to an unaffected version: time 0.2.23 or greater or the 0.3 series.

Workarounds

A possible workaround for crates affected through the transitive dependency in chrono, is to avoid using the default oldtime feature dependency of the chrono crate by disabling its default-features and manually specifying the required features instead.

Examples:

Cargo.toml:

chrono = { version = "0.4", default-features = false, features = ["serde"] }

chrono = { version = "0.4.22", default-features = false, features = ["clock"] }

Commandline:

cargo add chrono --no-default-features -F clock

Sources:

• chronotope/chrono#602 (comment)
• vityafx/serde-aux#21

In the unique reclaim path of BytesMut::reserve, the condition

if v_capacity >= new_cap + offset

uses an unchecked addition. When new_cap + offset overflows usize in release builds, this condition may incorrectly pass, causing self.cap to be set to a value that exceeds the actual allocated capacity. Subsequent APIs such as spare_capacity_mut() then trust this corrupted cap value and may create out-of-bounds slices, leading to UB.

This behavior is observable in release builds (integer overflow wraps), whereas debug builds panic due to overflow checks.

PoC

use bytes::*;

fn main() {
    let mut a = BytesMut::from(&b"hello world"[..]);
    let mut b = a.split_off(5);

    // Ensure b becomes the unique owner of the backing storage
    drop(a);

    // Trigger overflow in new_cap + offset inside reserve
    b.reserve(usize::MAX - 6);

    // This call relies on the corrupted cap and may cause UB & HBO
    b.put_u8(b'h');
}

Workarounds

Users of BytesMut::reserve are only affected if integer overflow checks are configured to wrap. When integer overflow is configured to panic, this issue does not apply.