Description

UAF vulnerability in the time and time zone module. Impact: Successful exploitation of this vulnerability may affect availability.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "3.3",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-17T09:17:30.730Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-17T09:17:30.730Z",
  "executiveSummary": "An issue classified as a Use-After-Free (UAF) vulnerability has been identified within the time and time zone module. This memory corruption flaw specifically affects the availability of the target system, potentially leading to denial of service conditions through application crashes or erratic behavior upon successful exploitation. The vulnerability originates in the memory management logic of the time zone handling routines, where a pointer to a dynamically allocated memory object continues to be referenced after the underlying memory has been deallocated or freed. Attackers capable of triggering this memory management anomaly can manipulate the application's state, leading to availability disruption. While specific requirements concerning authentication, network exposure, or privilege levels are contingent upon the exact integration context of the affected module, memory safety violations of this nature generally require precise timing and control over heap allocation patterns to weaponize effectively. The primary risk implication centers on system stability and service degradation, as improper handling of dangling pointers invariably introduces severe reliability hazards in software execution.",
  "technicalDetails": "The identified vulnerability is a Use-After-Free (UAF) memory corruption flaw localized within the time and time zone module. The root cause stems from improper lifetime management of heap-allocated objects representing internal time representations or time zone structural data. Specifically, when the affected component processes time and time zone operations, certain execution paths deallocate a memory buffer containing state information while retaining one or more active pointers referencing the same memory address.\nThe attack flow initiates when an interacting agent or local process supplies specific time-related inputs or triggers operations that invoke the vulnerable functions within the time and time zone module. During the execution of these routines, the component prematurely frees the memory chunk associated with a time zone context or structural element. Because the application fails to nullify the dangling pointers referencing this freed memory, subsequent operations attempt to read from or write to the defunct memory location.\nIf heap feng-shui or memory reclamation occurs between the free operation and the subsequent dereference, the dangling pointer may resolve to newly allocated data controlled or influenced by an unauthorized actor. This condition can lead to arbitrary data corruption, unexpected control flow diversion, or immediate application termination when invalid memory addresses are accessed. The vulnerable component is strictly confined to the time and time zone parsing and management logic. Depending on how the module is exposed within the broader software architecture, exploitation may be triggered via local execution vectors or remote interfaces that parse untrusted time zone definitions, calendar formats, or network time synchronization data. Post-exploitation impact is predominantly characterized by a denial of service state, affecting system availability due to continuous or induced segmentation faults and memory access violations."
}