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Fencer Vulns
critical 9.8

CVE-2022-42885 json

Open Babel has uninitialized pointer dereference in GRO residue parser

published 2023-07-21 3 y ago modified 2026-07-13 3 mo ago also GHSA-mw5r-wq2m-397c , PYSEC-2026-2787 , EUVD-2022-45947

cvss
9.8
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.8%
EPSS 0.8% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 56%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

A use of uninitialized pointer vulnerability exists in the GRO format res functionality of Open Babel 3.1.1 and master commit 530dbfa3. A specially crafted malformed file can lead to arbitrary code execution. An attacker can provide a malicious file to trigger this vulnerability.

Patch / fix

  • pypi openbabel 3.2.0
  • openbabel openSUSE Leap 16.0 3.2.0-bp160.1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2026:21190-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2022-42885 updated cvss 7.8

openbabel: Open Babel GRO format res uninitialized pointer dereference vulnerability

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
Proof of concept is public
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
total
Assessed
2 y ago

Exploit prediction

0.80% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 56% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • talosintelligence.com https://talosintelligence.com/vulnerability_reports/TALOS-2022-1668 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 3.1 7.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
OSV 3.1 7.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
GitHub 3.1 7.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
pypi openbabel
<3.2.0
3.2.0

Affected products

  • Open Babel Open Babel
  • openbabel open_babel

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-824 Access of Uninitialized Pointer

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.