RUSTSEC-2023-0055: Multiple soundness issues

[github-actions]

Multiple soundness issues

Details
Status	unsound
Package	lexical
Version	6.1.1
URL
Date	2023-09-03

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

The crate also has some correctness issues and appears to be unmaintained.

Alternatives

For quickly parsing floating-point numbers third-party crates are no longer needed. A fast float parsing algorith 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.

See advisory page for additional details.

[tannaurus]

This appears to have silenced in main https://github.com/sigstore/sigstore-rs/pull/387/files

This that a temporary solution, do we plan on monitoring this further?

A new warning has taken its place: https://rustsec.org/advisories/RUSTSEC-2023-0086

[flavio]

I've created timothee-haudebourg/json-number#6 that addresses both issues.

[flavio]

The upstream maintainer hasn't provided any feedback to the PR. There's also another PR that was created with the same purpose. No updates 😢

I've also sent a mail to the maintainer, but I didn't get any response.

I wonder how we should proceed