RUSTSEC-2025-0018: Potential out-of-bounds read with a malformed ELF file and the HashTable API.

What to do

1. See which version you have: cargo tree -i xmas-elf (it also shows which of your dependencies pulls it in).
2. Update within your version requirement: cargo update -p xmas-elf. If the fix is a newer major or minor than your requirement allows, raise it in Cargo.toml (for example xmas-elf = "0.10.0") 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

Affected versions of this crate only validated the index argument of HashTable::get_bucket and HashTable::get_chain against the input-controlled bucket_count and chain_count fields, but not against the size of the ELF section. As a result, a malformed ELF file could trigger out-of-bounds reads in a consumer of the HashTable API by setting these fields to inappropriately large values that would fall outside the relevant hash table section, and by introducing correspondingly out-of-bounds hash table indexes elsewhere in the ELF file.

References

• Package: crates.io/crates/xmas-elf
• Advisory: rustsec.org/advisories/RUSTSEC-2025-0018.html
• Report: github.com/nrc/xmas-elf/issues/86

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