What is GHSA-mw5r-wq2m-397c?

GHSA-mw5r-wq2m-397c is a security advisory published by GitHub Security Advisories with High severity. Open Babel has uninitialized pointer dereference in GRO residue parser

Which CVE IDs does GHSA-mw5r-wq2m-397c cover?

GHSA-mw5r-wq2m-397c covers the following CVE IDs: CVE-2022-42885. Each CVE has its own detail page on EchelonGraph Pulse with the synthesized EG score.

What is the CVSS v3 score of GHSA-mw5r-wq2m-397c?

GHSA-mw5r-wq2m-397c has a CVSS v3 base score of 7.8, published by GitHub Security Advisories.

Which products are affected by GHSA-mw5r-wq2m-397c?

GHSA-mw5r-wq2m-397c affects 1 product, including: pip/openbabel:\u003c 3.2.0.

GHSA-mw5r-wq2m-397cHighCVSS 7.8

Open Babel has uninitialized pointer dereference in GRO residue parser

Vendor

GitHub Security Advisories

Published

July 1, 2026

Last Modified

July 1, 2026

🔗 CVE IDs covered (1)

CVE-2022-42885 →

📋 Description

Summary

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

Details

The flaw was in the residue handling of the GRO reader. A malformed record caused the parser to use a residue 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 GRO 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.