Security Vulnerability Guidance Needed for Packaged Product (Unreal Engine 5.6.1)

Hello everyone,

My team is using Unreal Engine 5.6.1 to develop a new product, and we are approaching our closed beta release.

As part of our standard security validation process, our scanning tools have flagged several high and critical severity vulnerabilities in the third-party libraries that come pre-built with the engine. Our main concern is understanding the potential risk these pose to our end-users in a final, packaged application.

Here is a summary of the flagged components and the issue counts:

Library/Component Critical Issues High-Severity Issues
FreeType 2.10.0 1 1
stb (in MaterialX 1.38.10, astc-encoder 5.3) 1 7
WebRTC 5414 0 1
expat 2.2.10 0 1
FreeImage 3.18 0 21
lz4 1.9.3 (in c-blosc 1.21.0) 1 0
zstd 1.4.8 (in c-blosc 1.21.0) 0 1
harfbuzz 2.4.0 0 1
openexr 3.3.2 1 0
zlib 1.3.0 0 1
ICU 64.1 0 1
CEF 3 0 1

We attempted to mitigate these by building the engine from source, but we were unable to resolve all of them without risking major regressions in our product.

We are hoping the community or Epic staff could provide some guidance on two main questions:

  1. Are these types of vulnerabilities typically confined to the Unreal Editor, or are they likely to be present and exploitable in a final, packaged product?

  2. Is there any information available on whether Epic Games has plans to address these vulnerabilities in an upcoming engine release?

Any insights you can offer would be extremely helpful for our team as we finalize our release plan.

Thank you for your time and help!

1 Like

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

I do not have the answers to all the questions. Just letting you know that the team has been informed and will work on addressing those.

Hi @UE_FlavienP and all,

Bumping up this thread in light of the upcoming CRA deadlines, which directly impact companies commercializing software products in Europe.

Having access to an official SBOM from Epic, and understanding which dependencies are actually compiled into packaged applications (both in Development and Shipping profiles) is becoming a necessity for compliance.

In the meantime, is there any recommended guidance or best practice from Epic on how Unreal developers should document the Engine and related third-party dependencies in their technical documentation and cybersecurity assessments?

Thank you,
Riccardo