CVE-2023-27477: wasmtime vulnerable to miscompilation of `i8x16.select` with the same inputs on x86_64
Wasmtime’s code generation backend, Cranelift, has a bug on x86_64 platforms for the WebAssembly i8x16.select
instruction which will produce the wrong results when the same operand is provided to the instruction and some of the selected indices are greater than 16. There is an off-by-one error in the calculation of the mask to the pshufb
instruction which causes incorrect results to be returned if lanes are selected from the second vector.
The impact of this miscompilation is that the WebAssembly instruction can produce incorrect results for the i8x16.select
instruction. This should have no effect on embedders and does not represent a sandbox escape, for example. Guest programs, however, may behave unexpectedly due to the incorrect result of this instruction. In extreme cases if a guest program is handling untrusted input then the guest program may deviate from its intended execution, for example calling an imported host function with different arguments than intended. This still does not impact embedders, however, because there is no form of privilege escalation with the guest.
At this time it’s expected that this codegen pattern doesn’t show up in the wild that often. LLVM-generated modules, for example, do not appear to conventionally or idiomatically generate code which would hit this bug. It is possible, however, to still write code which triggers this, so it’s recommended for embedders to analyze existing modules to see if any are affected.
References
- docs.rs/wasmtime/latest/wasmtime/struct.Config.html
- github.com/advisories/GHSA-xm67-587q-r2vw
- github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime
- github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/commit/5dc2bbccbb363e474d2c9a1b8e38a89a43bbd5d1
- github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/security/advisories/GHSA-xm67-587q-r2vw
- github.com/webassembly/simd
- groups.google.com/a/bytecodealliance.org/g/sec-announce/c/Mov-ItrNJsQ
- nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-27477
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