CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-54786 — Wasmtime is a runtime for WebAssembly

Medium CVSS 5

Wasmtime is a runtime for WebAssembly. All versions prior to 24.0.10; versions 25.0.0 through those before 36.0.11; versions 37.0.0 through those before 44.0.3; and versions 45.0.0 and 45.0.1 contain a native implementation of WASIp1 which suffers from a leak in the fd_renumber function where the file descriptor being renumbered to is not properly closed. Wasmtime's implementation erroneously only updated the table of descriptors for WASIp1 and didn't update the underlying table of descriptors used by the host. This behavior means that while fd_renumber works correctly from a guest's perspective it ends up leaking resources in the host that aren't cleaned up until the corresponding Store is destroyed. In a loop, guests can use fd_renumber to cause hosts to exhaust both resources and file descriptors. This bug only affects the native implementation of WASIp1, meaning that only runtimes which load core wasm modules and expose fd_renumber are affected. Runtimes are additionally only affected if they expose the ability to acquire a file descriptor, such as opening a file. For runtimes that deny access to files they are unaffected. This issue has been fixed in versions 24.0.10, 36.0.11…

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5 (3.1)
Published
2026-07-01
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-772

Affected products

  • bytecodealliance / wasmtime

Showing 1 representative product identities from 4 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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