Two Critical Wasmtime Flaws Could Let Malicious WebAssembly Modules Escape Sandboxes
thehackernews.com Oct 26, 2026

Two Critical Wasmtime Flaws Could Let Malicious WebAssembly Modules Escape Sandboxes

AI-summarised brief · reviewed before publication

Two critical vulnerabilities were discovered in Wasmtime, a WebAssembly runtime used as an embeddable library, allowing malicious modules to break out of the sandbox that isolates them. Both bugs reside in Cranelift, Wasmtime’s default compiler, and received CVSS scores of 9.9. One flaw (CVE‑2026‑115889) stems from 24‑bit value fields that overflow on large functions, causing type confusion; the other (CVE‑2026‑115893) affects ARM64 br_table handling, letting an out‑of‑range index jump to unintended code. Fixed releases (36.0.19, 48.0.7, 49.0.4, and 50.0.0) were issued on October 19‑20, but only supported LTS lines receive patches; older lines, including 24.x, remain vulnerable. Because Wasmtime is compiled into services that accept third‑party modules—such as Fastly’s Compute platform—any host that does not rebuild with the patched library is exposed to arbitrary code execution.

💡 Why It Matters

  • · Unpatched Wasmtime instances can let attackers run native code on servers that execute user‑supplied WebAssembly, turning a sandboxed service into a full‑system compromise.