In the crossbeam rust crate, the bounded channel incorrectly assumed that Vec::from_iter had allocated capacity that was the same as the number of iterator elements. Vec::from_iter does not actually guarantee that and may allocate extra memory. The destructor of the bounded channel reconstructs Vec from the raw pointer based on the incorrect assumptions - this is unsound and caused a deallocation with the incorrect capacity when Vec::from_iter had allocated different sizes than the number of iterator elements. The impact on Firefox is undetermined, but in another use case, the behavior was causing corruption of jemalloc structures.



External Reference:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2020-45/#CVE-2020-15254