GHSA-897f-g5gm-fmxm - Wasmtime: Bit-packing in Cranelift compiler causes silent overflow and miscompilation
## Summary
In Wasmtime prior to v43, the Cranelift compiler backend bit-packs its SSA value indices in a way that can result in silent overflow in release builds, and result in incorrect value references in the IR resulting in arbitrary miscompilation. A very large Wasm function body, or one that is specially crafted to use many SSA values, can use this to force type-confusion or other arbitrary side-effects and escape the sandbox.
Cranelift was changed in Wasmtime v43 to use a full `u32` index, with checks if that limit is exceeded, and so is no longer susceptible to this bug.
## Impact
A Wasmtime engine with default settings (using the Cranelift backend) on any architecture/platform could experience a sandbox escape from a specially-crafted Wasm module.
## Patches
Wasmtime v36.0.19 has been released which fixes this issue.
CRITICAL
Severity & confidence
Source severitycritical
Platform severitycritical
Confidencehigh
Exploitationunknown
CVSS9.9
Affected
Vendorswasmtime
Productswasmtime
Reporting sources (2)
GitHub Security Advisories
NIST NVD - National Vulnerability Database
Timeline & provenance
Published2026-10-23T22:02:20
Last updated2026-10-27T20:53:32
Ingested2026-10-23T22:03:28
FreshnessNEAR-REAL-TIME
Threat typeadvisory
Recommended action
Review the advisory and upgrade affected packages to the first patched version.
Next steps
- Identify affected systems in your environment.
- Apply the vendor patch or mitigation guidance.
- Review logs for indicators described in the advisory.
- Follow the affected vendor/product to track updates.
Confidence explanation
Reported by a government or cert-grade source (CISA, NCSC, NVD, ENISA, MSRC).
Source type: vendor ยท Original: GitHub Security Advisories