Is This vulnerability exploited in the wild?

No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of This vulnerability being exploited in the wild.

How severe is This vulnerability?

High severity, with a CVSS score of 7.3, published 21 July 2023.

Is there a fix for This vulnerability?

No fixed version is recorded yet. Check the vendor's advisory in the references below. If you run it, Junglewise drafts a mitigation that fits your setup and applies it once you approve, with senior security engineers behind it.

How is This vulnerability attacked?

It is attacked over the network, in a software library.

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.

Open Babel out-of-bounds write in Gaussian orientation parser

Severity: high · CVSS 7.3 · Published 2023-07-21

Open Babel is a widely used software library for converting and viewing chemical data files. A security flaw in how it processes certain scientific file formats (Gaussian) allows an attacker to crash the software or potentially take control of the system by providing a specially crafted, malicious file. This is particularly significant for organizations running web-based chemical converters or molecular modeling tools that use this library to process user-uploaded data.

Technologies: openbabel (PyPI). Vendors: PyPI.

Quick answers

Is This vulnerability exploited in the wild?: No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of This vulnerability being exploited in the wild.
How severe is This vulnerability?: High severity, with a CVSS score of 7.3, published 21 July 2023.
Which products and versions are affected?: openbabel (PyPI) < 3.2.0.
Is there a fix for This vulnerability?: No fixed version is recorded yet. Check the vendor's advisory in the references below. If you run it, Junglewise drafts a mitigation that fits your setup and applies it once you approve, with senior security engineers behind it.
How is This vulnerability attacked?: It is attacked over the network, in a software library.
Am I affected?: 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.

Technical details

An out-of-bounds write vulnerability exists in Open Babel's Gaussian format orientation functionality within 'formats/gaussformat.cpp'. The root cause is located in the 'ReadMolecule' function, where a fixed-size stack buffer ('coords_type' of 25 bytes) is used to store tokens from the input file. The code uses 'strncpy' to copy up to 24 bytes into this buffer and subsequently uses 'strcat' to append a 13-character fixed string (' orientation:'), resulting in a stack-based buffer overflow. An attacker can exploit this by providing a malformed Gaussian file to a service or application using Open Babel (such as the 'obabel' CLI tool). This can lead to memory corruption and arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability is addressed in version 3.2.0.

Affected products

Open Babel Open Babel 3.1.1, master commit 530dbfa3, and all versions prior to 3.2.0

Timeline

2023-07-21: disclosed: Initial advisory publication
2023-07-21: advisory: Talos vulnerability report TALOS-2022-1672 published
2026-07-01: other: Advisory withdrawn as a duplicate of GHSA-vr3p-gg26-45v9

References

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