Release of Invalid Pointer or Reference Affecting cereal package, versions [,1.3.1)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
critical
0
10

CVSS assessment by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
1.98% (78th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-CONAN-CEREAL-10075403
  • published8 May 2025
  • disclosed30 Mar 2020
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 30 Mar 2020

CVE-2020-11105  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-763  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade cereal to version 1.3.1 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Release of Invalid Pointer or Reference. An issue was discovered in USC iLab cereal through 1.3.0. It employs caching of std::shared_ptr values, using the raw pointer address as a unique identifier. This becomes problematic if an std::shared_ptr variable goes out of scope and is freed, and a new std::shared_ptr is allocated at the same address. Serialization fidelity thereby becomes dependent upon memory layout. In short, serialized std::shared_ptr variables cannot always be expected to serialize back into their original values. This can have any number of consequences, depending on the context within which this manifests.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1