CVE-2023-1999 — There exists a use after free/double free in libwebp

There exists a use after free/double free in libwebp. An attacker can use the ApplyFiltersAndEncode() function and loop through to free best.bw and assign best = trial pointer. The second loop will then return 0 because of an Out of memory error in VP8 encoder, the pointer is sti

01What is this vulnerability?

There exists a use after free/double free in libwebp. An attacker can use the ApplyFiltersAndEncode() function and loop through to free best.bw and assign best = trial pointer. The second loop will then return 0 because of an Out of memory error in VP8 encoder, the pointer is still assigned to trial and the AddressSanitizer will attempt a double free.

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
Chromium	libwebp	0.4.2, 0.4.2

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2023-06-20T11:28:52.547Z
• Last modified: 2025-02-13T16:39:44.993Z

09References

• chromium.googlesource.com — https://chromium.googlesource.com/webm/libwebp
• security.gentoo.org — https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202309-05