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RUSTSEC-2023-0055

Published Sep 3, 2023·Last modified Feb 4, 2026
Affected Components(0)

No affected components available

Description

lexical contains multiple soundness issues:

  1. Bytes::read() allows creating instances of types with invalid bit patterns
  2. BytesIter::read() advances iterators out of bounds
  3. The BytesIter trait has safety invariants but is public and not marked unsafe
  4. write_float() calls MaybeUninit::assume_init() on uninitialized data, which is is not allowed by the Rust abstract machine
  5. radix() calls MaybeUninit::assume_init() on uninitialized data, which is is not allowed by the Rust abstract machine

The crate also has some correctness issues.

Alternatives

For quickly parsing floating-point numbers third-party crates are no longer needed. A fast float parsing algorithm by the author of lexical has been merged into libcore.

For quickly parsing integers, consider atoi and btoi crates (100% safe code). atoi_radix10 provides even faster parsing, but only with -C target-cpu=native, and at the cost of some unsafe.

For formatting integers in a #[no_std] context consider the numtoa crate.

For working with big numbers consider num-bigint and num-traits.

Risk Scores
Base Score
0.0

Measures severity based on intrinsic characteristics of the vulnerability, independent of environment.

Threat Intelligence
0.0

No exploitation activity has been observed at this time. Continue routine monitoring.

EPSS
N/A

Probability that this vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days.

Exploit
Not available

We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.

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