CVE-2022-42885High· 7.8▾ TwilightOpen Babel has uninitialized pointer dereference in GRO residue parser
▾ Twilight zone — High severity, or a signal on a lesser flaw
impact 42.9 · likelihood 0.2 · exploitation 0
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Exploit-prediction probability, daily snapshots since Jul 4.
Disclosure to exploitation, from the record and what we observed since indexing it.
Disclosed via GHSA
0.8%
A memory-safety vulnerability in Open Babel's GRO parser caused an uninitialized pointer dereference when reading a crafted input file.
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.
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).
All releases up to and including 3.1.1.
3.2.0 (released 2026-05-26).
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.
Reported by Cisco TALOS.
openbabel < 3.2.0Upgrade to a patched release:
openbabel 3.2.0Connected by shared product, vendor, weakness, or advisory.
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