In versions prior 0.11.3 it's possible to make from_slice panic by feeding it certain malformed input. It's never documented that from_slice (and from_bytes which wraps it) can panic, and its' return type (Result<Self, DecodeError>) suggests otherwise.

In practice, from_slice/from_bytes is frequently used in networking code (for example in rust-libp2p) and is being called with unsanitized data from untrusted sources. This can allow attackers to cause DoS by causing an unexpected panic in the network client's code.

Affected versions of this crate passes an uninitialized buffer to a user-provided trait function AsyncRead::poll_read().

Arbitrary AsyncRead::poll_read() implementations can read from the uninitialized buffer (memory exposure) and also can return incorrect number of bytes written to the buffer. Reading from uninitialized memory produces undefined values that can quickly invoke undefined behavior.

The flaw was fixed in commit 5ba266a by ensuring the newly allocated part of the buffer is zero-initialized before passing it to a user-provided AsyncRead::poll_read().

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.

If a tokio::sync::oneshot channel is closed (via the oneshot::Receiver::close method), a data race may occur if the oneshot::Sender::send method is called while the corresponding oneshot::Receiver is awaited or calling try_recv.

When these methods are called concurrently on a closed channel, the two halves of the channel can concurrently access a shared memory location, resulting in a data race. This has been observed to cause memory corruption.

Note that the race only occurs when both halves of the channel are used after the Receiver half has called close. Code where close is not used, or where the Receiver is not awaited and try_recv is not called after calling close, is not affected.

See tokio#4225 for more details.