CVE-2018-25024

Vulnerability

Affected versions of the actix-web crate (before 0.7.15) contain an unsound use of unsafe Rust that allows coercing an immutable reference into a mutable reference. This violates Rust's memory safety guarantees and can lead to data races and corruption. The flaw is present in the crate's internal implementation and can be triggered through normal API usage that exercises the unsafe code paths.

Exploitation

An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by interacting with a server running an affected version. No special privileges are required; sending crafted HTTP requests that trigger the vulnerable code path may cause the unsound coercion. The advisory [3] indicates multiple memory safety issues, but specific exploitation steps are not publicly detailed. However, the unsound reference conversion could lead to unexpected behavior under concurrency.

Impact

Successful exploitation can lead to memory corruption, potentially resulting in a crash or arbitrary code execution (RCE) depending on how the corrupted memory is used. The RustSec advisory categorizes this as a memory corruption vulnerability [3].

Mitigation

The fix is included in actix-web version 0.7.15 and later, released after the issue was disclosed. Users should update their dependencies to at least 0.7.15 to remediate the vulnerability. No workarounds are available; upgrading is the only solution.