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.

Source published

23 Oct 2026 22:02:20 UTC

Source modified

23 Oct 2026 22:25:51 UTC

Observed here

24 Oct 2026 13:19:54 UTC

Source terms

GitHub Advisory Database · CC-BY-4.0

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This view projects the publisher's source fields for reading; the original JSON retains additional fields and CVE enrichment containers. Attribution: osv · GitHub Advisory Database · CC-BY-4.0. Source text is retained; field grouping and change labels are provided by ChangeIntel.

CVSS_V3 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

Publisher rating · CRITICAL