Motoko's incremental garbage collector is impacted by an uninitialized memory access bug, caused by incorrect use of write barriers in a few locations. This vulnerability could potentially allow unauthorized read or write access to a Canister's memory. However, exploiting this bug requires the Canister to enable the incremental garbage collector or enhanced orthogonal persistence, which are non-default features in Motoko.
This vulnerability carries a MEDIUM severity rating with a CVSS v3.1 score of 5.6, indicating it can be exploited remotely over the network but requires specific conditions to be met without requiring user interaction and does not require pre-existing privileges . The vulnerability impacts limited data confidentiality, limited integrity, and limited availability for affected systems. Impacting 1 product from dfinity organizations running these solutions should prioritize assessment and patching.
Reported in 2024, this vulnerability emerged during an era marked by increased sophistication in supply chain attacks, cloud infrastructure vulnerabilities, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) security challenges. Security practices during this period emphasized zero-trust architectures, container security, and API protection.
2024-12-09T15:15:12.203
2025-12-08T18:51:42.820
Analyzed
6b35d637-e00f-4228-858c-b20ad6e1d07b
CVSSv3.1: 5.6 (MEDIUM)
SecUtils normalizes and enriches National Vulnerability Database (NVD) records by standardizing vendor and product identifiers, aggregating vulnerability metadata from both NVD and MITRE sources, and providing structured context for security teams. For dfinity's affected products, we extract Common Platform Enumeration (CPE) data, Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) classifications, CVSS severity metrics, and reference data to enable rapid vulnerability prioritization and asset correlation. This record contains no exploit code, proof-of-concept instructions, or attack methodologies—only defensive intelligence necessary for patch management, risk assessment, and security operations.