Mio is a Metal I/O library for Rust. When using named pipes on Windows, mio will under some circumstances return invalid tokens that correspond to named pipes that have already been deregistered from the mio registry. The impact of this vulnerability depends on how mio is used. For some applications, invalid tokens may be ignored or cause a warning or a crash. On the other hand, for applications that store pointers in the tokens, this vulnerability may result in a use-after-free. For users of Tokio, this vulnerability is serious and can result in a use-after-free in Tokio. The vulnerability is Windows-specific, and can only happen if you are using named pipes. Other IO resources are not affected. This vulnerability has been fixed in mio v0.8.11. All versions of mio between v0.7.2 and v0.8.10 are vulnerable. Tokio is vulnerable when you are using a vulnerable version of mio AND you are using at least Tokio v1.30.0. Versions of Tokio prior to v1.30.0 will ignore invalid tokens, so they are not vulnerable. Vulnerable libraries that use mio can work around this issue by detecting and ignoring invalid tokens.
Referencing memory after it has been freed can cause a program to crash, use unexpected values, or execute code.
The use of previously-freed memory can have any number of adverse consequences, ranging from the corruption of valid data to the execution of arbitrary code, depending on the instantiation and timing of the flaw. The simplest way data corruption may occur involves the system’s reuse of the freed memory. Use-after-free errors have two common and sometimes overlapping causes:
In this scenario, the memory in question is allocated to another pointer validly at some point after it has been freed. The original pointer to the freed memory is used again and points to somewhere within the new allocation. As the data is changed, it corrupts the validly used memory; this induces undefined behavior in the process. If the newly allocated data happens to hold a class, in C++ for example, various function pointers may be scattered within the heap data. If one of these function pointers is overwritten with an address to valid shellcode, execution of arbitrary code can be achieved.