Description

Rust is a programming language. The Rust Security Response WG was notified that the Rust standard library prior to version 1.77.2 did not properly escape arguments when invoking batch files (with the `bat` and `cmd` extensions) on Windows using the `Command`. An attacker able to control the arguments passed to the spawned process could execute arbitrary shell commands by bypassing the escaping. The severity of this vulnerability is critical for those who invoke batch files on Windows with untrusted arguments. No other platform or use is affected.

The `Command::arg` and `Command::args` APIs state in their documentation that the arguments will be passed to the spawned process as-is, regardless of the content of the arguments, and will not be evaluated by a shell. This means it should be safe to pass untrusted input as an argument.

On Windows, the implementation of this is more complex than other platforms, because the Windows API only provides a single string containing all the arguments to the spawned process, and it's up to the spawned process to split them. Most programs use the standard C run-time argv, which in practice results in a mostly consistent way arguments are splitted.

One exception though is `cmd.exe` (used among other things to execute batch files), which has its own argument splitting logic. That forces the standard library to implement custom escaping for arguments passed to batch files. Unfortunately it was reported that our escaping logic was not thoro...

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2024-24576

CVSS Base Severity: CRITICAL

CVSS Base Score: 10.0

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected Products

Vendor: rust-lang

Product: rust

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.05% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 19.9% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

EPSS Date: 2025-03-14 (when was this score calculated)

References

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/security/advisories/GHSA-q455-m56c-85mh
https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/io/enum.ErrorKind.html#variant.InvalidInput
https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/os/windows/process/trait.CommandExt.html#tymethod.raw_arg
https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/process/struct.Command.html
https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/process/struct.Command.html#method.arg
https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/process/struct.Command.html#method.args
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues
https://www.rust-lang.org/policies/security
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/W7WRFOIAZXYUPGXGR5UEEW7VTTOD4SZ3/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/RPH3PF7DVSS2LVIRLW254VWUPVKJN46P/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/N323QAEEUVTJ354BTVQ7UB6LYXUX2BCL/
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/04/09/16

Timeline