CVE-2024-47763 Wasmtime runtime crash when combining tail calls with trapping imports

What is CVE-2024-47763?

CVE-2024-47763 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in bytecodealliance wasmtime, published on 9 Oct 2024. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Wasmtime is an open source runtime for WebAssembly. Wasmtime's implementation of WebAssembly tail calls combined with stack traces can result in a runtime crash in certain WebAssembly modules. The runtime crash may be undefined behavior if Wasmtime was compiled with Rust 1.80 or prior. The runtime crash is a deterministic process abort when Wasmtime is compiled with Rust 1.81 and later. WebAssembly tail calls are a proposal which relatively recently reached stage 4 in the standardization process. Wasmtime first enabled support for tail calls by default in Wasmtime 21.0.0, although that release contained a bug where it was only on-by-default for some configurations. In Wasmtime 22.0.0 tail calls were enabled by default for all configurations. The specific crash happens when an exported function in a WebAssembly module (or component) performs a `return_call` (or `return_call_indirect` or `return_call_ref`) to an imported host function which captures a stack trace (for example, the host function raises a trap). In this situation, the stack-walking code previously assumed there was always at least one WebAssembly frame on the stack but with tail calls that is no longer true. With the tail-call proposal it's possible to have an entry trampoline appear as if it directly called the exit trampoline. This situation triggers an internal assert in the stack-walking code which raises a Rust `panic!()`. When Wasmtime is compiled with Rust versions 1.80 and prior this means that an `extern "C"` function in Rust is raising a `panic!()`. This is technically undefined behavior and typically manifests as a process abort when the unwinder fails to unwind Cranelift-generated frames. When Wasmtime is compiled with Rust versions 1.81 and later this panic becomes a deterministic process abort. Overall the impact of this issue is that this is a denial-of-service vector where a malicious WebAssembly module or component can cause the host to crash. There is no other impact at this time other than availability of a service as the result of the crash is always a crash and no more. This issue was discovered by routine fuzzing performed by the Wasmtime project via Google's OSS-Fuzz infrastructure. We have no evidence that it has ever been exploited by an attacker in the wild. All versions of Wasmtime which have tail calls enabled by default have been patched: * 21.0.x - patched in 21.0.2 * 22.0.x - patched in 22.0.1 * 23.0.x - patched in 23.0.3 * 24.0.x - patched in 24.0.1 * 25.0.x - patched in 25.0.2. Wasmtime versions from 12.0.x (the first release with experimental tail call support) to 20.0.x (the last release with tail-calls off-by-default) have support for tail calls but the support is disabled by default. These versions are not affected in their default configurations, but users who explicitly enabled tail call support will need to either disable tail call support or upgrade to a patched version of Wasmtime. The main workaround for this issue is to disable tail support for tail calls in Wasmtime, for example with `Config::wasm_tail_call(false)`. Users are otherwise encouraged to upgrade to patched versions.

Weakness: CWE-670

Which versions are affected by CVE-2024-47763?

12 open source packages ship an affected version, including wasmtime and wasmtime-bin. It affects 1 product.

Products include Bytecodealliance Wasmtime.

How do I fix CVE-2024-47763?

Upgrade wasmtime to a fixed version for your release line: 21.0.2, 22.0.1, 23.0.3 or 24.0.1.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2024-47763 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2024-47763 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in bytecodealliance wasmtime

• CVE-2026-34971 Wasmtime miscompiled guest heap access enables sandbox escape on aarch64 Cranelift Critical 9.0
• CVE-2026-34987 Wasmtime with Winch compiler backend on aarch64 may allow a sandbox-escaping memory access Critical 9.0
• CVE-2022-39393 Wasmtime vulnerable to data leakage between instances in the pooling allocator High 8.6
• CVE-2022-24791 Use after free in Wasmtime High 8.1
• CVE-2026-47261 Wasmtime: WASI path_open(TRUNCATE) bypasses `FilePerms::WRITE` host restriction High 7.5

Sources

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

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2024-47763, GHSA-q8hx-mm92-4wvg, PYSEC-2024-312, RUSTSEC-2024-0440, UBUNTU-CVE-2024-47763.