RUSTSEC-2021-0070: VecStorage Deserialize Allows Violation of Length Invariant

What to do

1. See which version you have: cargo tree -i nalgebra (it also shows which of your dependencies pulls it in).
2. Update within your version requirement: cargo update -p nalgebra. If the fix is a newer major or minor than your requirement allows, raise it in Cargo.toml (for example nalgebra = "0.27.1") or update the dependency that pulls it in.
3. Check again with cargo audit, or paste your Cargo.lock into our Cargo.toml checker.

Details from the advisory

The Deserialize implementation for VecStorage did not maintain the invariant that the number of elements must equal nrows * ncols. Deserialization of specially crafted inputs could allow memory access beyond allocation of the vector.

This flaw was introduced in v0.11.0 (086e6e) due to the addition of an automatically derived implementation of Deserialize for MatrixVec. MatrixVec was later renamed to VecStorage in v0.16.13 (0f66403) and continued to use the automatically derived implementation of Deserialize.

This flaw was corrected in commit 5bff536 by returning an error during deserialization if the number of elements does not exactly match the expected size.

References

• Package: crates.io/crates/nalgebra
• Advisory: rustsec.org/advisories/RUSTSEC-2021-0070.html
• Report: github.com/dimforge/nalgebra/issues/883

From the RustSec Advisory Database (CC0-1.0) via the OSV export, downloaded Oct 24, 2026. Severity score computed from the published CVSS vector.