RUSTSEC-2024-0020: Stack buffer overflow with whoami on several Unix platforms

What to do

1. See which version you have: cargo tree -i whoami (it also shows which of your dependencies pulls it in).
2. Update within your version requirement: cargo update -p whoami. If the fix is a newer major or minor than your requirement allows, raise it in Cargo.toml (for example whoami = "1.5.0") 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

With versions of the whoami crate >= 0.5.3 and < 1.5.0, calling any of these functions leads to an immediate stack buffer overflow on illumos and Solaris:

• whoami::username
• whoami::realname
• whoami::username_os
• whoami::realname_os

With versions of the whoami crate >= 0.5.3 and < 1.0.1, calling any of the above functions also leads to a stack buffer overflow on these platforms:

• Bitrig
• DragonFlyBSD
• FreeBSD
• NetBSD
• OpenBSD

This occurs because of an incorrect definition of the passwd struct on those platforms.

As a result of this issue, denial of service and data corruption have both been observed in the wild. The issue is possibly exploitable as well.

This vulnerability also affects other Unix platforms that aren't Linux or macOS.

This issue has been addressed in whoami 1.5.0.

For more information, see this GitHub issue.

References

• Package: crates.io/crates/whoami
• Advisory: rustsec.org/advisories/RUSTSEC-2024-0020.html
• Report: github.com/ardaku/whoami/issues/91

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