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 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.