CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-38538 — Whatsapp Whatsapp security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5

A race condition in an event subsystem led to a heap use-after-free issue in established audio/video calls that could have resulted in app termination or unexpected control flow with very low probability.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5 (3.1)
Published
2023-10-04
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-362

Affected products

  • whatsapp / whatsapp

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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