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 typeD
to be dropped. It is incorrectly "dropped" by runningE
's drop behavior, rather thanD
's. For example ifD
is&str
andE
isstd::io::Error
, there would be a call ofstd::io::Error::drop
in which the reference received by theDrop
impl does not refer to a valid value of typestd::io::Error
, but instead to&str
. -
If downcasting to
D
, there remains a value of typeE
to be dropped. WhenD
andE
do not happen to be the same size,E
's drop behavior is incorrectly executed in the wrong location. The reference received by theDrop
impl may point left or right of the realE
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
.