CVE-2022-42885 Open Babel has uninitialized pointer dereference in GRO residue parser

What is CVE-2022-42885?

CVE-2022-42885 is a critical memory corruption vulnerability in Open Babel, published on 21 Jul 2023. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

A use of uninitialized pointer vulnerability exists in the GRO format res functionality of Open Babel 3.1.1 and master commit 530dbfa3. A specially crafted malformed file can lead to arbitrary code execution. An attacker can provide a malicious file to trigger this vulnerability.

Weakness: CWE-824

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-42885?

3 open source packages ship an affected version, including openbabel. It affects 1 product.

Products include Openbabel Open Babel.

How do I fix CVE-2022-42885?

Upgrade openbabel to 3.2.0 or later.

Upgrade to the fixed version. Memory-safe languages, compiler hardening and fuzzing prevent most new cases. More about Memory corruption.

Is CVE-2022-42885 being exploited?

It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2022-42885 exists.

Other vulnerabilities in Open Babel

• CVE-2022-41793 Open Babel has out-of-bounds write in CSR PadString (title field) Critical 9.8
• CVE-2022-43467 Open Babel has out-of-bounds write in PQS coord_file parser Critical 9.8
• CVE-2022-44451 Open Babel has uninitialized pointer dereference in MSI atom parser Critical 9.8
• CVE-2022-46280 Open Babel has uninitialized pointer dereference in PQS pFormat Critical 9.8
• CVE-2022-46289 Open Babel has out-of-bounds write in ORCA nAtoms parser Critical 9.8

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2022-42885, GHSA-mw5r-wq2m-397c, PYSEC-2026-2787, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-42885.