Canister Developer Kit For The Internet ComputerApplication · Dfinity

CVE-2024-7884

HIGH · 7.5 CVSS v3.1 Published 2024-09-05
Fix available
A fix is available. Upgrade to 0.8.2 / 0.9.3 or later.
See remediation →
84/100
Remediation priority · High
Remotely reachable No privileges Zero-click Patch available

Official description Straight from the sourceThe vendor's or NVD's own wording, published unedited. Authoritative, but often terse — it says what broke, rarely what to do.

NVD · unedited
When a canister method is called via ic_cdk::call* , a new Future CallFuture is created and can be awaited by the caller to get the execution result. Internally, the state of the Future is tracked and stored in a struct called CallFutureState. A bug in the polling implementation of the CallFuture allows multiple references to be held for this internal state and not all references were dropped before the Future is resolved. Since we have unaccounted references held, a copy of the internal state ended up being persisted in the canister's heap and thus causing a memory leak. Impact Canisters built in Rust with ic_cdk and ic_cdk_timers are affected. If these canisters call a canister method, use timers or heartbeat, they will likely leak a small amount of memory on every such operation. In the worst case, this could lead to heap memory exhaustion triggered by an attacker. Motoko based canisters are not affected by the bug. PatchesThe patch has been backported to all minor versions between >= 0.8.0, <= 0.15.0. The patched versions available are 0.8.2, 0.9.3, 0.10.1, 0.11.6, 0.12.2, 0.13.5, 0.14.1, 0.15.1 and their previous versions have been yanked. WorkaroundsThere are no known workarounds at the moment. Developers are recommended to upgrade their canister as soon as possible to the latest available patched version of ic_cdk to avoid running out of Wasm heap memory. Upgrading the canisters (without updating `ic_cdk`) also frees the leaked memory but it's only a temporary solution.

Technical summary Written by usOur analysis, written from the advisory, the CVSS vector and the affected-version data. It adds context the advisory leaves out, and never invents facts that are not in the source.

dbcve analysis
How this class of weakness works · CWE-401

Allocated memory is never released on some path, so a long-running service or a repeatedly triggered request steadily consumes memory until performance degrades or the process crashes. Attackers exploit it by simply driving the leaking path. Remediation is pairing every allocation with a release and using ownership patterns or tooling to catch what leaks.

General guidance for the memory leak class — the official description and references above are authoritative for this specific CVE. Want a bespoke review and a reviewed fix? Ask our team →

Affected products & versions What the vendor confirmedThe version ranges the vendor confirmed as vulnerable. If your version sits inside a range here, treat yourself as exposed until you have upgraded.

NVD · CPE data
Canister Developer Kit For The Internet ComputerApplication
Affected:>= 0.8.0, < 0.8.2>= 0.9.0, < 0.9.3>= 0.11.0, < 0.11.6>= 0.12.0, < 0.12.2>= 0.13.0, < 0.13.5= 0.10.0= 0.14.0= 0.15.0

CVSS breakdown How the score is builtThe industry scoring standard. It rates how the flaw is reached, what it takes to exploit, and what an attacker gains — the score is derived from those, not the other way round.

From the vector
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High

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

Remediation Closing itWhat it takes to close this. Where a vendor fix exists we point at it; where none exists we say so plainly, and can build one. Effort estimates are scoped from the advisory, not from your codebase.

dbcve · scoped
Upgrade available Upgrade to 0.8.2 / 0.9.3 / 0.11.6 or later
Fixed in 0.8.20.9.30.11.6
Vendor patch github.com →
Recommended fix High confidence

Upgrade ic_cdk to version 0.15.1 (latest patched) or the appropriate patched version for your minor release line

  1. Identify the current version of ic_cdk in your project's Cargo.toml or dependency files
  2. Update the ic_cdk dependency to one of the patched versions: 0.8.2, 0.9.3, 0.10.1, 0.11.6, 0.12.2, 0.13.5, 0.14.1, or 0.15.1
  3. Run cargo update to refresh the dependency lock file
  4. Rebuild the canister using dfx build or cargo build --target wasm32-unknown-unknown
  5. Redeploy the canister to the Internet Computer network
Caveat Memory leak fix is backward compatible; no breaking changes expected

Generated from the published advisory — verify against the referenced sources before acting.

We can perform the upgrade in your staging environment and verify nothing breaks — typical engagement from $1,950. Get the upgrade done

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References Go to the primary sourcePrimary sources — vendor advisories, patches and trackers. Where our summary and a reference disagree, the reference wins.

Primary sources

Practitioner notes

Contributed

Peer-ranked notes from engineers who’ve handled CVE-2024-7884 in production — separate from our analysis above.

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