GHSA-jr2x-6qf6-q5mcHighCVSS 7.8

Open Babel has uninitialized pointer dereference in MSI atom parser

Published
July 1, 2026
Last Modified
July 1, 2026

🔗 CVE IDs covered (1)

📋 Description

Summary

A memory-safety vulnerability in Open Babel's MSI parser caused an uninitialized pointer dereference when reading a crafted input file.

Details

The flaw was in the atom handling of the MSI reader. A malformed record caused the parser to dereference an atom pointer that had never been initialized.

Impact

Open Babel is a C++ library and CLI used to read and write chemistry file formats; it is shipped by Linux distributions and embedded in services that may parse untrusted input. Triggering this vulnerability requires the victim to open a malicious MSI file with the obabel tool, the OBConversion API, or any of the language bindings (Python, Ruby, Java, R, Perl, C#, PHP).

Affected versions

All releases up to and including 3.1.1.

Patched version

3.2.0 (released 2026-05-26).

Patch

Fix commit: https://github.com/openbabel/openbabel/commit/fa9a2d9a

A minimized reproducer for this CVE is checked in under test/files/fuzz_regress/ and is exercised on every CI build under ASAN+UBSAN by the fuzzregresstest harness.

Credit

Reported by Cisco TALOS.

🎯 Affected products1

  • pip/openbabel:< 3.2.0

🔗 References (6)