CVE-2022-42885

A use of uninitialized pointer vulnerability exists in the GRO format res functionality of Open Babel 3.1.1 and master commit 530dbfa3. A specially crafted malformed file can lead to arbitrary code execution. An attacker can provide a malicious file to trigger this vulnerability.

Duplicate Advisory

This advisory has been withdrawn because it is a duplicate of GHSA-mw5r-wq2m-397c. This link is maintained to preserve external references.

Original Description

A use of uninitialized pointer vulnerability exists in the GRO format res functionality of Open Babel 3.1.1 and master commit 530dbfa3. A specially crafted malformed file can lead to arbitrary code execution. An attacker can provide a malicious file to trigger this vulnerability.

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.

Credit

Reported by Cisco TALOS.

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.

Credit

Reported by Cisco TALOS.

A use of uninitialized pointer vulnerability exists in the GRO format res functionality of Open Babel 3.1.1 and master commit 530dbfa3. A specially crafted malformed file can lead to arbitrary code execution. An attacker can provide a malicious file to trigger this vulnerability.

This update for openbabel fixes the following issues:

Changes in openbabel:

• Update to version 3.2.0:
  • Add an L-BFGS optimizer, used by default for gen3d and conformer searches
  • New macrocycle ring builder (Dale codes) for better initial 3D geometry of large rings
  • Add KET (Ketcher JSON) and ChemicalJSON (.cjson) format support
  • Drop Python 2 support; Python 3.13 supported
  • Faster, vectorized distance-geometry implementation
  • Full CMake 4 compatibility and modernized build
  • Backwards compatible with 3.0 and 3.1
  • Fix many crash and memory-safety bugs found via OSS-Fuzz and TALOS, including the following security issues: CVE-2022-37331 (boo#1217676), CVE-2022-41793, CVE-2022-42885, CVE-2022-43467, CVE-2022-43607, CVE-2022-44451, CVE-2022-46280, CVE-2022-46289, CVE-2022-46290, CVE-2022-46291, CVE-2022-46292, CVE-2022-46294, CVE-2022-46295, CVE-2025-10994, CVE-2025-10995, CVE-2025-10996, CVE-2025-10997, CVE-2025-10998, CVE-2025-10999, CVE-2025-11000, CVE-2026-2704 (boo#1258501), CVE-2026-2705 (boo#1258507) and CVE-2026-3408 (boo#1259041)