Bytecodealliance: >> Wasmtime Security Vulnerabilities
Wasmtime is a runtime for WebAssembly. From 25.0.0 to before 36.0.7, 42.0.2, and 43.0.1, Wasmtime with its Winch (baseline) non-default compiler backend may allow properly constructed guest Wasm to access host memory outside of its linear-memory sandbox. This vulnerability requires use of the Winch compiler (-Ccompiler=winch). By default, Wasmtime uses its Cranelift backend, not Winch. With Winch, the same incorrect assumption is present in theory on both aarch64 and x86-64. The aarch64 case has an observed-working proof of concept, while the x86-64 case is theoretical and may not be reachable in practice. This Winch compiler bug can allow the Wasm guest to access memory before or after the linear-memory region, independently of whether pre- or post-guard regions are configured. The accessible range in the initial bug proof-of-concept is up to 32KiB before the start of memory, or ~4GiB after the start of memory, independently of the size of pre- or post-guard regions or the use of explicit or guard-region-based bounds checking. However, the underlying bug assumes a 32-bit memory offset stored in a 64-bit register has its upper bits cleared when it may not, and so closely related variants of the initial proof-of-concept may be able to access truly arbitrary memory in-process. This could result in a host process segmentation fault (DoS), an arbitrary data leak from the host process, or with a write, potentially an arbitrary RCE. This vulnerability is fixed in 36.0.7, 42.0.2, and 43.0.1.
CVSS Score
9.0
EPSS Score
0.0
Published
2026-04-09
Wasmtime is a runtime for WebAssembly. From 28.0.0 to before 36.0.7, 42.0.2, and 43.0.1, Wasmtime's implementation of its pooling allocator contains a bug where in certain configurations the contents of linear memory can be leaked from one instance to the next. The implementation of resetting the virtual memory permissions for linear memory used the wrong predicate to determine if resetting was necessary, where the compilation process used a different predicate. This divergence meant that the pooling allocator incorrectly deduced at runtime that resetting virtual memory permissions was not necessary while compile-time determine that virtual memory could be relied upon. The pooling allocator must be in use, Config::memory_guard_size configuration option must be 0, Config::memory_reservation configuration must be less than 4GiB, and pooling allocator must be configured with max_memory_size the same as the memory_reservation value in order to exploit this vulnerability. If all of these conditions are applicable then when a linear memory is reused the VM permissions of the previous iteration are not reset. This means that the compiled code, which is assuming out-of-bounds loads will segfault, will not actually segfault and can read the previous contents of linear memory if it was previously mapped. This represents a data leakage vulnerability between guest WebAssembly instances which breaks WebAssembly's semantics and additionally breaks the sandbox that Wasmtime provides. Wasmtime is not vulnerable to this issue with its default settings, nor with the default settings of the pooling allocator, but embeddings are still allowed to configure these values to cause this vulnerability. This vulnerability is fixed in 36.0.7, 42.0.2, and 43.0.1.
CVSS Score
2.3
EPSS Score
0.0
Published
2026-04-09
Wasmtime is a runtime for WebAssembly. From 25.0.0 to before 36.0.7, 42.0.2, and 43.0.1, Wasmtime's Winch compiler backend contains a bug where translating the table.grow operator causes the result to be incorrectly typed. For 32-bit tables this means that the result of the operator, internally in Winch, is tagged as a 64-bit value instead of a 32-bit value. This invalid internal representation of Winch's compiler state compounds into further issues depending on how the value is consumed. The primary consequence of this bug is that bytes in the host's address space can be stored/read from. This is only applicable to the 16 bytes before linear memory, however, as the only significant return value of table.grow that can be misinterpreted is -1. The bytes before linear memory are, by default, unmapped memory. Wasmtime will detect this fault and abort the process, however, because wasm should not be able to access these bytes. Overall this this bug in Winch represents a DoS vector by crashing the host process, a correctness issue within Winch, and a possible leak of up to 16-bytes before linear memory. Wasmtime's default compiler is Cranelift, not Winch, and Wasmtime's default settings are to place guard pages before linear memory. This means that Wasmtime's default configuration is not affected by this issue, and when explicitly choosing Winch Wasmtime's otherwise default configuration leads to a DoS. Disabling guard pages before linear memory is required to possibly leak up to 16-bytes of host data. This vulnerability is fixed in 36.0.7, 42.0.2, and 43.0.1.
CVSS Score
6.1
EPSS Score
0.0
Published
2026-04-09
Wasmtime is a runtime for WebAssembly. Prior to 24.0.7, 36.0.7, 42.0.2, and 43.0.1, Wasmtime's implementation of transcoding strings between components contains a bug where the return value of a guest component's realloc is not validated before the host attempts to write through the pointer. This enables a guest to cause the host to write arbitrary transcoded string bytes to an arbitrary location up to 4GiB away from the base of linear memory. These writes on the host could hit unmapped memory or could corrupt host data structures depending on Wasmtime's configuration. Wasmtime by default reserves 4GiB of virtual memory for a guest's linear memory meaning that this bug will by default on hosts cause the host to hit unmapped memory and abort the process due to an unhandled fault. Wasmtime can be configured, however, to reserve less memory for a guest and to remove all guard pages, so some configurations of Wasmtime may lead to corruption of data outside of a guest's linear memory, such as host data structures or other guests's linear memories. This vulnerability is fixed in 24.0.7, 36.0.7, 42.0.2, and 43.0.1.
CVSS Score
6.1
EPSS Score
0.0
Published
2026-04-09
Wasmtime is a runtime for WebAssembly. From 32.0.0 to before 36.0.7, 42.0.2, and 43.0.1, Wasmtime's Cranelift compilation backend contains a bug on aarch64 when performing a certain shape of heap accesses which means that the wrong address is accessed. When combined with explicit bounds checks a guest WebAssembly module this can create a situation where there are two diverging computations for the same address: one for the address to bounds-check and one for the address to load. This difference in address being operated on means that a guest module can pass a bounds check but then load a different address. Combined together this enables an arbitrary read/write primitive for guest WebAssembly when accesssing host memory. This is a sandbox escape as guests are able to read/write arbitrary host memory. This vulnerability has a few ingredients, all of which must be met, for this situation to occur and bypass the sandbox restrictions. This miscompiled shape of load only occurs on 64-bit WebAssembly linear memories, or when Config::wasm_memory64 is enabled. 32-bit WebAssembly is not affected. Spectre mitigations or signals-based-traps must be disabled. When spectre mitigations are enabled then the offending shape of load is not generated. When signals-based-traps are disabled then spectre mitigations are also automatically disabled. The specific bug in Cranelift is a miscompile of a load of the shape load(iadd(base, ishl(index, amt))) where amt is a constant. The amt value is masked incorrectly to test if it's a certain value, and this incorrect mask means that Cranelift can pattern-match this lowering rule during instruction selection erroneously, diverging from WebAssembly's and Cranelift's semantics. This incorrect lowering would, for example, load an address much further away than intended as the correct address's computation would have wrapped around to a smaller value insetad. This vulnerability is fixed in 36.0.7, 42.0.2, and 43.0.1.
CVSS Score
9.0
EPSS Score
0.0
Published
2026-04-09
Wasmtime is a runtime for WebAssembly. In 43.0.0, cloning a wasmtime::Linker is unsound and can result in use-after-free bugs. This bug is not controllable by guest Wasm programs. It can only be triggered by a specific sequence of embedder API calls made by the host. Specifically, the following steps must occur to trigger the bug clone a wasmtime::Linker, drop the original linker instance, use the new, cloned linker instance, resulting in a use-after-free. This vulnerability is fixed in 43.0.1.
CVSS Score
1.0
EPSS Score
0.0
Published
2026-04-09
Wasmtime is a runtime for WebAssembly. Starting with Wasmtime 39.0.0, the `component-model-async` feature became the default, which brought with it a new implementation of `[Typed]Func::call_async` which made it capable of calling async-typed guest export functions. However, that implementation had a bug leading to a panic under certain circumstances: First, the host embedding calls `[Typed]Func::call_async` on a function exported by a component, polling the returned `Future` once. Second, the component function yields control to the async runtime (e.g. Tokio), e.g. due to a call to host function registered using `LinkerInstance::func_wrap_async` which yields, or due an epoch interruption. Third, the host embedding drops the `Future` after polling it once. This leaves the component instance in a non-reenterable state since the call never had a chance to complete. Fourth, the host embedding calls `[Typed]Func::call_async` again, polling the returned `Future`. Since the component instance cannot be entered at this point, the call traps, but not before allocating a task and thread for the call. Fifth, the host embedding ignores the trap and drops the `Future`. This panics due to the runtime attempting to dispose of the task created above, which panics since the thread has not yet exited. When a host embedder using the affected versions of Wasmtime calls `wasmtime::component::[Typed]Func::call_async` on a guest export and then drops the returned future without waiting for it to resolve, and then does so again with the same component instance, Wasmtime will panic. Embeddings that have the `component-model-async` compile-time feature disabled are unaffected. Wasmtime 40.0.4 and 41.0.4 have been patched to fix this issue. Versions 42.0.0 and later are not affected. If an embedding is not actually using any component-model-async features then disabling the `component-model-async` Cargo feature can work around this issue. This issue can also be worked around by either ensuring every `call_async` future is awaited until it completes or refraining from using the `Store` again after dropping a not-yet-resolved `call_async` future.
CVSS Score
6.9
EPSS Score
0.001
Published
2026-02-24
Wasmtime is a runtime for WebAssembly. Prior to versions 24.0.6, 36.0.6, 4.0.04, 41.0.4, and 42.0.0, Wasmtime's implementation of WASI host interfaces are susceptible to guest-controlled resource exhaustion on the host. Wasmtime did not appropriately place limits on resource allocations requested by the guests. This serves as a Denial of Service vector. Wasmtime 24.0.6, 36.0.6, 40.0.4, 41.0.4, and 42.0.0 have all been released with the fix for this issue. These versions do not prevent this issue in their default configuration to avoid breaking preexisting behaviors. All versions of Wasmtime have appropriate knobs to prevent this behavior, and Wasmtime 42.0.0-and-later will have these knobs tuned by default to prevent this issue from happening. There are no known workarounds for this issue without upgrading. Embedders are recommended to upgrade and configure their embeddings as necessary to prevent possibly-malicious guests from triggering this issue.
CVSS Score
6.9
EPSS Score
0.001
Published
2026-02-24
Wasmtime is a runtime for WebAssembly. Prior to versions 24.0.6, 36.0.6, 4.0.04, 41.0.4, and 42.0.0, Wasmtime's implementation of the `wasi:http/types.fields` resource is susceptible to panics when too many fields are added to the set of headers. Wasmtime's implementation in the `wasmtime-wasi-http` crate is backed by a data structure which panics when it reaches excessive capacity and this condition was not handled gracefully in Wasmtime. Panicking in a WASI implementation is a Denial of Service vector for embedders and is treated as a security vulnerability in Wasmtime. Wasmtime 24.0.6, 36.0.6, 40.0.4, 41.0.4, and 42.0.0 patch this vulnerability and return a trap to the guest instead of panicking. There are no known workarounds at this time. Embedders are encouraged to update to a patched version of Wasmtime.
CVSS Score
6.9
EPSS Score
0.0
Published
2026-02-24
Wasmtime is a runtime for WebAssembly. Starting in version 29.0.0 and prior to version 36.0.5, 40.0.3, and 41.0.1, on x86-64 platforms with AVX, Wasmtime's compilation of the `f64.copysign` WebAssembly instruction with Cranelift may load 8 more bytes than is necessary. When signals-based-traps are disabled this can result in a uncaught segfault due to loading from unmapped guard pages. With guard pages disabled it's possible for out-of-sandbox data to be loaded, but unless there is another bug in Cranelift this data is not visible to WebAssembly guests. Wasmtime 36.0.5, 40.0.3, and 41.0.1 have been released to fix this issue. Users are recommended to upgrade to the patched versions of Wasmtime. Other affected versions are not patched and users should updated to supported major version instead. This bug can be worked around by enabling signals-based-traps. While disabling guard pages can be a quick fix in some situations, it's not recommended to disabled guard pages as it is a key defense-in-depth measure of Wasmtime.
CVSS Score
4.1
EPSS Score
0.0
Published
2026-01-27
Page 1