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High · 7.1 CVE-2026-90648 EUVD-2026-76923GHSA-7jjw-49wp-pr5h

wasm2c in WebAssembly wabt through 1.0.41 allows sandbox escape in some situations that primarily involve 32-bit platforms, aka a "table fl…

Published Sep 12, 2026 · Updated Oct 23, 2026 · Assigned by mitre

Description

wasm2c in WebAssembly wabt through 1.0.41 allows sandbox escape in some situations that primarily involve 32-bit platforms, aka a "table flip" attack. It does not check the return value of calloc() in wasm_rt_allocate_funcref_table() (wasm2c/wasm-rt-impl-tableops.inc). When the funcref table allocation fails, table->data is left NULL while table->size keeps the guest-declared element count; thus, bounds checks still pass and table element accesses resolve to absolute memory addresses (i * sizeof(wasm_rt_funcref_t)). This gives arbitrary read and write of host process memory and - via table.get, table.set, and call_indirect - arbitrary code execution, defeating the isolation that wasm2c exists to provide (a full sandbox escape). wasm2c is used as an in-process sandboxing boundary by RLBox and WasmBoxC, including in Firefox, which compiles the Graphite, Hunspell, Ogg, Expat, and Woff2 libraries via wasm2c to contain untrusted font, media, and XML input. Therefore, sandboxing in these applications is potentially affected. Exploitation requires the funcref table allocation to fail, for example under an address-space limit (RLIMIT_AS), on 32-bit hosts, with vm.overcommit_memory=2, or under memory pressure. On 64-bit Linux with default overcommit the allocation succeeds and the defect is not triggered. The wasm2c memory allocator aborts on calloc failure in the same runtime; the table allocator lacks this abort behavior. This was introduced in commit ab9e0b55 (PR #813).

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
WebAssembly wabt ≤ 1.0.41 —

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Debian 14 wabt 1.0.42+dfsg+~cs1.0.39-2 —
Debian 13 wabt No fix yet —
Debian 12 wabt No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 wabt No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS wabt No fix yet —
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS wabt No fix yet —
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS wabt No fix yet —
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS wabt No fix yet —

References