Critical Rust flaw enables Windows command injection attacks
Critical Rust flaw enables Windows command injection attacks
35 comments
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Seems a bit clickbaity to me. It's a flaw in Windows/cmd.exe, not Rust. Rust is just called out because it tries to emulated proper argument passing on Windows (and didn't get it perfectly right). All languages are affected by this but most of them just throw their hands in the air and say "you're on your own":
- Erlang (documentation update)
- Go (documentation update)
- Haskell (patch available)
- Java (won’t fix)
- Node.js (patch will be available)
- PHP (patch will be available)
- Python (documentation update)
- Ruby (documentation update)
It's also extremely unlikely that you'd be running a bat script with untrusted arguments on Windows.
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I mean, let's be real, Rust is really called out because it causes high drama between C devs and Rust advocates, which drives engagement.
It's probably all kicking off in about 10 different comment sections right now
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It's also extremely unlikely that you'd be running a bat script with untrusted arguments on Windows.
It happens in yt-dl, which is where this was first reported https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/security/advisories/GHSA-hjq6-52gw-2g7p
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Oof. Looks like this affected some other languages as well - somebody at Microsoft needs to up their documentation game, methinks.
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This hurts my brain. We have nice shell languages now, can we just lock down and phase out the rest please? I don't even want to know the hidden cost of running Bash or sh scripts tbh. Both are languages where you can do something not right enough, because everything just has to be obnoxious.
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Windows is as much to blame as any affected languages tbh.
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Now that it has been identified, it should be an easy fix, at least.
Still, it's important to remember that Rust is still a relatively young ecosystem and flaws like this exist until we get burned by them.
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And in fact it's not specific to Rust, and Rust is the first language with a fix available. (Thanks to some other comments for pointing this out.) Java has apparently declared it "won't fix."
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it should be an easy fix
But it's not. Have you read the article?
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I looked at the diff, it's around 100 lines of new code and a few hundred lines of comments and tests.
I couldn't have written it, but there are many smarter people that fixed it after they learned of the problem.What also made it easier to fix is that they (sensibly) chose to error on certain strings that can't be escaped safely.
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At least it's not a segfault, buffer overflow, or whatever else plagues C/C++ programs and is not easy to detect.
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But it got a 10/10 on the scoring system by Github.
The issue isn't actually too much related to the Rust core language itself, but rather how they handle scripts on Windows platform. So if you don't have a Windows program that runs Batch scripts, then it doesn't matter to you. I wonder how common it is to run Batch scripts in Rust?
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if you don't have a Windows program that runs Batch scripts with untrusted arguments
This only matters when running the scripts with user inputs passed as arguments to the command, which I can't imagine being remotely common at all.
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I don't think my company uses batch scripts anywhere, but if they did, it would probably be in the app installer for Windows or something.
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Also, the reason this is a CVE is because Rust itself guarantees that calling commands doesn't evaluate shell stuff (but this breaks that guarantee). As far as I know C/C++ makes no such guarantee whatsoever.
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I've run into bizarre behavior with windows command lines plenty of times before, but I'd never put all the pieces together and realized that:
a) windows really does pass around unadorned monolithic strings containing the entire command line of an executed command, and
b) there's no parsing standard for command lines in windows
sigh, windows
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In February, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) urged technology companies to adopt memory-safe programming languages like Rust.
My comment is somewhat unfair, but WH is not the right body to make this kind of recommendation.
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And the problem is about executing programs in windows. This is not about memory-safety.
A bunch of other languages are affected as well as noted by @colonial@lemmy.world.
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Why not? I mean they are right. Adopting memory safe languages is a good step forward, because it would eliminate bunch of mistakes before they happen. And the White House does not recommend Rust only, but a memory-safe language, something like Rust or something different. I wish my government would do the same.
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Who would be then, Department of Defense, NSA, CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security? Aren’t all those the same body (executive) as White House of the National Cyber Director? Is your problem with having White House in the name?
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Those agencies are under the executive branch, and its been made very clear in the past that they prefer sneaking in backdoors to valid best practices.
The NSA sabotaging the Elliptic Curve method of random number generation used in the RSA algorithm comes to mind. They would otherwise be THE experts to trust, but lets look at the others:
FBI - Waco, Ruby Ridge, planned to assassinate Martin Luther King and so many others. CIA - promotes fascism internationally, causing all sorts of chaos in Latin America and the Middle East. Ever wonder how Komeni's faction overthrew the Shah? The CIA decided he had gone soft.
Germany is so trusting of the US on cyber-security measures that their government has been trying to ditch Windows for over a decade.
TL;DR: In the US, government experts do NOT have your personal security best interests at heart. They can and will use any dirty trick possible to spy on and control both our own citizens and those of other countries. Last authories that anyone should trust.
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35 comments