libhdf5 walks a local heap's free list when it loads the heap's data and
refuses the heap ("bad heap free list") when a free block starts or ends
outside the data segment, or links to offset 0. We never looked at the
free list, so a damaged old-style group listed names read from the broken
heap: once the user block of cve-2021-36977.h5 was applied, its root
listed eight garbage names where libhdf5 fails.
LocalHeap::validate_free_list (new) mirrors H5HL__fl_deserialize, with a
cycle bound, and accepts H5HL_FREE_NULL (1) or an all-ones head as the
end of the list. Like libhdf5 it runs when the first name is needed, not
on parse, so an empty group with a damaged heap still lists as empty
(cve-2018-13871.h5, cve-2024-29166.h5, gh-4431-poc-03.h5 keep matching
h5py).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
clawhdf5-format
Pure-Rust HDF5 binary format parsing and writing — no C dependencies.
Features
- Zero-copy superblock, object header, and B-tree parsing
- Chunked dataset read/write with filter pipelines
no_stdsupport (disablestdfeature)- Optional parallel reads via Rayon
- SHA-256 provenance tracking
Usage
use clawhdf5_format::Superblock;
let data = std::fs::read("data.h5").unwrap();
let sb = Superblock::from_bytes(&data).unwrap();
println!("HDF5 version {}.{}", sb.version_major(), sb.version_minor());
License
MIT