All public versions prior to 1.02 used an insufficient check to ensure that users correctly marked the dependent type as either covariant or not_covariant. This allowed users to mark a dependent as covariant even though its type was not covariant but invariant, for certain invariant types involving trait object lifetimes. One example for such a dependent type is type Dependent<'a> = RefCell<Box<dyn fmt::Display + 'a>>. Such a type allowed unsound usage in purely safe user code that leads to undefined behavior. The patched versions now produce a compile time error if such a type is marked as covariant.

References

• Voultapher/self_cell#49
• https://rustsec.org/advisories/RUSTSEC-2023-0070.html