Is CVE-2025-10998 exploited in the wild?

No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2025-10998 being exploited in the wild.

How severe is CVE-2025-10998?

Medium severity, with a CVSS score of 5.5, published 1 July 2026.

Which products and versions are affected?

openbabel (PyPI) < 3.2.0, ECOSYSTEM:introduced=0,fixed=3.2.0.

Is there a fix for CVE-2025-10998?

Yes. openbabel (PyPI): upgrade to 3.2.0 or later. Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.

How is CVE-2025-10998 attacked?

It is attacked with local access, in a software library.

Am I affected by CVE-2025-10998?

Check whether you run openbabel (PyPI) at an affected version. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.

CVE-2025-10998: Open Babel NULL pointer dereference in ChemKinFormat parser

Q: Which products and versions are affected?

openbabel (PyPI) < 3.2.0, ECOSYSTEM:introduced=0,fixed=3.2.0.

Q: Is there a fix for CVE-2025-10998?

Yes. openbabel (PyPI): upgrade to 3.2.0 or later. Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.

Q: How is CVE-2025-10998 attacked?

It is attacked with local access, in a software library.

Q: Am I affected by CVE-2025-10998?

Check whether you run openbabel (PyPI) at an affected version. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.

CVE-2025-10998 · Severity: medium · CVSS 5.5 · Published 2026-07-01

Open Babel, a widely used chemistry data toolkit, is vulnerable to a crash when processing specially crafted ChemKin files. If a user or automated service opens a malicious file using this library, the application will terminate unexpectedly. This can lead to a denial-of-service, impacting the availability of research tools and chemistry-related web services.

Technologies: openbabel (PyPI). Vendors: PyPI.

Quick answers

Is CVE-2025-10998 exploited in the wild?: No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2025-10998 being exploited in the wild.
How severe is CVE-2025-10998?: Medium severity, with a CVSS score of 5.5, published 1 July 2026.
Which products and versions are affected?: openbabel (PyPI) < 3.2.0, ECOSYSTEM:introduced=0,fixed=3.2.0.
Is there a fix for CVE-2025-10998?: Yes. openbabel (PyPI): upgrade to 3.2.0 or later. Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
How is CVE-2025-10998 attacked?: It is attacked with local access, in a software library.
Am I affected by CVE-2025-10998?: Check whether you run openbabel (PyPI) at an affected version. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.

How to fix

openbabel (PyPI): upgrade to 3.2.0 or later
```
pip install "openbabel>=3.2.0"
```

Technical details

A NULL pointer dereference exists in the ChemKinFormat::ReadReactionQualifierLines function within src/formats/chemkinformat.cpp. The vulnerability is triggered when the parser encounters a malformed reaction qualifier record in a ChemKin file. An attacker can exploit this by providing a crafted file to the obabel CLI tool, the OBConversion API, or any of its language bindings (Python, Java, etc.). Successful exploitation results in a process crash (denial-of-service). The issue was identified via OSS-Fuzz and is addressed in version 3.2.0.

Affected products

Open Babel openbabel <= 3.1.1

Identifiers

CVE-2025-10998
GHSA-j9pp-7wfg-q7fj
PYSEC-2026-2782

Timeline

2025-09-14: other: Issue reported on GitHub
2026-05-26: patched: Version 3.2.0 released
2026-07-01: advisory: GitHub Advisory published

References

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