Vulnerability Database

358,842

Total vulnerabilities in the database

CVE-2024-47813 — bytecodealliance / wasmtime

Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition

Wasmtime is an open source runtime for WebAssembly. Under certain concurrent event orderings, a wasmtime::Engine's internal type registry was susceptible to double-unregistration bugs due to a race condition, leading to panics and potentially type registry corruption. That registry corruption could, following an additional and particular sequence of concurrent events, lead to violations of WebAssembly's control-flow integrity (CFI) and type safety. Users that do not use wasmtime::Engine across multiple threads are not affected. Users that only create new modules across threads over time are additionally not affected. Reproducing this bug requires creating and dropping multiple type instances (such as wasmtime::FuncType or wasmtime::ArrayType) concurrently on multiple threads, where all types are associated with the same wasmtime::Engine. Wasm guests cannot trigger this bug. See the "References" section below for a list of Wasmtime types-related APIs that are affected. Wasmtime maintains an internal registry of types within a wasmtime::Engine and an engine is shareable across threads. Types can be created and referenced through creation of a wasmtime::Module, creation of wasmtime::FuncType, or a number of other APIs where the host creates a function (see "References" below). Each of these cases interacts with an engine to deduplicate type information and manage type indices that are used to implement type checks in WebAssembly's call_indirect function, for example. This bug is a race condition in this management where the internal type registry could be corrupted to trigger an assert or contain invalid state. Wasmtime's internal representation of a type has individual types (e.g. one-per-host-function) maintain a registration count of how many time it's been used. Types additionally have state within an engine behind a read-write lock such as lookup/deduplication information. The race here is a time-of-check versus time-of-use (TOCTOU) bug where one thread atomically decrements a type entry's registration count, observes zero registrations, and then acquires a lock in order to unregister that entry. However, between when this first thread observed the zero-registration count and when it acquires that lock, another thread could perform the following sequence of events: re-register another copy of the type, which deduplicates to that same entry, resurrecting it and incrementing its registration count; then drop the type and decrement its registration count; observe that the registration count is now zero; acquire the type registry lock; and finally unregister the type. Now, when the original thread finally acquires the lock and unregisters the entry, it is the second time this entry has been unregistered. This bug was originally introduced in Wasmtime 19's development of the WebAssembly GC proposal. This bug affects users who are not using the GC proposal, however, and affects Wasmtime in its default configuration even when the GC proposal is disabled. Wasmtime users using 19.0.0 and after are all affected by this issue. We have released the following Wasmtime versions, all of which have a fix for this bug: * 21.0.2 * 22.0.1 * 23.0.3 * 24.0.1 * 25.0.2. If your application creates and drops Wasmtime types on multiple threads concurrently, there are no known workarounds. Users are encouraged to upgrade to a patched release.

CVSS v3:

  • Severity: Low
  • Score: 2.9
  • AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:L

CWEs:

Frequently Asked Questions

A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.

CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) estimates technical severity, but it doesn't automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, affected asset criticality, known exploitation (proof-of-concept or in-the-wild), and whether compensating controls exist. A "Medium" CVSS on an exposed, production system can be more urgent than a "Critical" on an isolated, non-production host.

A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. In practice, risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.

Recurring findings usually come from incomplete Asset Discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host. Unknown or unmanaged assets (often called Shadow IT) are a common reason the same issues resurface.

Use a simple, repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress using consistent metrics so remediation is steady, not reactive.

SynScan combines attack surface monitoring and continuous security auditing to keep your inventory current, flag high-impact vulnerabilities early, and help you turn raw findings into a practical remediation plan.