major security vulnerability found in rust (over hyped?)

[@LowLevelTV]

Come learn about C networking and threading at lowlevel.academy 😎

[@ItsCOMMANDer_]

oh its FREE, defently a steal

[@Alfred-Neuman]

From the cmd.c example from the beginning, could you also inject a command with this input? I was expecting something like this: Robert \" & ping \"google,com

[@Alfred-Neuman]

I had a question but apparently KZbin comments are censored if you write anything that is slightly looking like a line of code or Windows commands... :(

[@eugenej.5584]

Nice, I'll watch it on Memegen channel Kappa

[@izqsunoizquierdo885]

When a discount? :(

[@SzaboB33]

Instructions unclear, the children are hidden in the closet and are staying there indefinitely

[@Sool101]

I've heard something about "an injection", hope it helps.

[@hdthor]

If they can’t fit in the closet as solid children, DO NOT liquefy them to fit. It’s extremely hard separating liquids once they’re mixed.

[@schmoris]

I'm sending my flying car!

[@BillAnt]

Oh nooo another VAX. lol

[@rusi6219]

LLL should have appended an else-if statement to that

[@Elesario]

For a 10/10 I'd expect that any compiled rust code that takes an input to be vulnerable.

[@BillAnt]

Exactly, this requires certain conditions to be met in order to be a viable attack. So yeah, this is maybe a 7 or lower out of 10 which should be patched soon anyway. heh

[@pluto8404]

Windows is a vulnerability in and of its self.

[@pjderouen]

CVE risk is determined by qualitative analysis, I think. Probably why it’s a 10/10

[@BillAnt]

​@@pjderouen - Yes it's a higher quality vuln, but they forgot consider the quantitative part, meaning how many machines are being affected. Due to having to meet certain conditions, it's really not that widespread.

[@user255]

@@BillAnt I think the problem is that people assume CVE score to mean different thing that it actually does. The bug itself is 10/10, but how easy it is to find in wild is perhaps 2/10.

[@wlockuz4467]

To put it in comparison, its the same score as the xz backdoor that was recently uncovered. Its so ridiculous. Jia Tan probably died inside when he saw the severity score.

[@unperrier5998]

the difference is that that xz backdoor had not even reached production, it was only in the testing distributions when it was found. whereas this Rust vulnerability is actualyl in production, in the latest version of the language and most likely a lot more of the previous ones. So yeah you're right it doesn't compare with xz: xz was way less severe :)

[@wlockuz4467]

@@unperrier5998 I hope you're being sarcastic. xz was an elaborate supply chain attack, or at the least it was supposed to be. While this vulnerability which is hardly a Rust vulnerability and more of Windows vulnerability is the classic case of unsanitized input creating problems. The most important thing to differentiate here is that the Rust bug only happens when accepting user input in very specific conditions, so the attack surface is already tiny. A backdoor in comparison is way more serious because just by using a backdoored version of a lib your software immediately becomes vulnerable, so this is a huge attack surface. Worst part is you wouldn't even realise this because the backdoor is in one of the dependencies and not in your own code.

[@unperrier5998]

@@wlockuz4467 no it's the same argument: you're saying Rust vulnerability is not as serious because it's not really used (the attack surface is small) and I'm saying xz vulnerability has a tiny attack surface because it wasn't in production, check it up.

[@fulconandroadcone9488]

@@unperrier5998 was this functionality supposed to sanitize user input? if there is no claim to use input sanitation for a given platform I would consider it programmer error. I remember the days where you had to watch every user input for injection on web, be it sql, js or something else, these days it is handled for you. not to mention someone needs to inject malicious input, which would most likely require some user action such copying commands from the inter webs

[@rohithkumarbandari]

@@unperrier5998 It's not even a vulnerability it's just a small feature missing from command module.

[@andrewdupper973]

i dont really understand how this is a bug. if you pass an unsanitized input, you get injections, skill issue

[@what42pizza]

I think the problem is that .args() is supposed to be the sanitization, and the bug is that it isn't

[@andrewdupper973]

@@what42pizza yknow this is probably correct. i did not review the rust documentation before making my rage bait comment. if that’s the case it’s surprising to me that the bug is discovered now

[@d-o-n-u-t]

@@HiYesThisIsJake Well, Java is Java, and nobody likes Java for a reason... I think because the expected cross-platform behaviour is for it to be sanitized, even ignoring security, this would be a bug in and of itself. Blaming Windows devs is also unfair here because the way that cmd.exe sees it, it has no way of knowing whether the input was sanitized or not, so it has to take what it sees at face value. A normal user chaining commands and injected code look no different to it.

[@baileyharrison1030]

​@@d-o-n-u-t It's because Rust's implementation for Command::new cannot just directly call Win32's CreateProcessA() function with a batch file as the application name. This is because the Windows docs state: "To run a batch file, you must start the command interpreter; set lpApplicationName to cmd.exe and set lpCommandLine to the following arguments: /c plus the name of the batch file. If Command::new directly called CreateProcessA() with the user's provided program name instead of as an argument to cmd.exe, this vulnerability wouldn't exist. Although this would mean that running a batch file from rust would have to be more explicit and look something like: Command::new("cmd.exe").arg("/c").arg("./test.bat") Which would make it a lot more obvious to the programmer that sanitisation is needed here.

[@mk72v2oq]

There are lots of other languages confirmed to be affected. (Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby) And yeah, now Rust got a dumb patch which simply disallows you to pass " into args. Because this is basically an unfixable fundamental Windows issue. Most other languages marked it as won't fix though, and I'm in their camp here.

[@kibels894]

They rated this 10/10? CVEs are such a joke

[@no_name4796]

Yeah same rating of xz, which is just a masterpiece of a backdoor

[@antikommunistischaktion]

They really are.

[@Liamnissan22222]

You should create a better standard.

[@funkemunky]

@@no_name4796 the 10/10 rating for xz was totally justified. It was technically just an RCE at root level vulnerability that anyone with the private key could access, in a fundamental core part of the Linux networking stack. That is BAD. Having the Rust CVE being limited to one niche use of the Rust standard library that could prove a program vulnerable in the right circumstances, does not equate to 10/10

[@witherking2537]

​@@funkemunky literally he is agreeing with you

[@Eysvar]

I also find it weird that they singled out Rust for this because it affects many libraries across many languages, just Windows cmd.exe not escaping things correctly. Why specifically target Rust? (Answer: sensational news story)

[@joe_ferreira]

💯 agree. It also doesn't do privilege escalation and is local. This shouldn't be a 10.

[@LowLevelTV]

Exactly

[@sakurai1996]

"EvEn UnITeD sTaTEs GOvErNmeNt ReCOmMeNdS It" is causing this sensational headline

[@lpbigfish3730]

For the clicks

[@1vader]

I think the reason is that Rust released a very prominent security advisory to notify users while many other languages don't even plan to patch it. For example Python and Go only updated their documentation and Java won't get a patch at all. PHP and Node plan to patch it but don't have a patch for it yet. The PHP security advisory on GitHub is still inaccessible. It's unclear which other languages will even release advisories. At the moment, Haskell seems to be the only other language that has already patched it. Though ofc it's still very poor journalism to not figure that out and only report on the Rust issue.

[@latiotech]

It gets at the heart of why CVSS scoring is hard - there's no consideration for "how commonly is this used like this?"

[@gregoryreimer869]

Ya, for an application it's probably an easier call but for a language it's weird. Because I sure could see someone using this in a way that makes an application that warrants a 10/10 for the app, but does that make it a 10/10 for the language that implemented the feature that was supposed to stop it?

[@BillAnt]

They should have an app for this, by inputting the vuln into an algorithm which should score it based on the conditions and severity running on a few or millions of machines.

[@109Rage]

Their rating system is silly, and doesn't Even take into account actual potential of the exploit. CVE-2020-19909 for example. Curl was found to have a bug where you could set a "retry delay" on an operation if it fails, and if this delay was too large (on the order of weeks or longer) the integer would overflow. They gave this a 9.8, simply because the bug involved an integer overflow, and there was a miniscule, non-plausivle chance of a DoS.

[@Ether_Void]

"I found a vulnerability in the pipe operator. If I pipe netcat into bash it's a remote code execution vulnerability" /jk of course But it's basically the logic they use for the 10/10 it COULD be used in a way where an online attacker could send malicious data that COULD be piped into a batch script and the entire server COULD run with elevated privileges. The logic however is pretty bad as almost every vulnerability (and in my example even expected features) can cause RCE. I don't see how CVSS handles "potential for undocumented pitfalls", so I assume that's why they put all the things that could happen into the score.

[@ten8468]

I think you meant "bad" not "hard" 🙁

[@Iceman259]

"This gun is defective, every time I load it, point it at my foot and pull the trigger, it shoots me!"

[@stzi7691]

Well, as of DOS: This gun cannot point anywhere else!

[@rusi6219]

The problem is that issues that are less than this have been constantly pointed out in C by the same people that are now excusing Rust.

[@JochCool]

Your analogy would be apt if the documentation of the gun explicitly said that it is safe to point at your own feet.

[@rian0xFFF]

So why do people blame C/C++ if all the faults can be blamed on the programmer?

[@hcolider2817]

@@rian0xFFF It was always just an excuse to build a more closed-down environment and tool that can be rug-pulled out from beneath you at any time. It only takes some light digging to find that rust has constant issues with activists running the show. They are growing increasingly litigious and controlling, especially if their whole trademarking fiasco from last year is anything to go by.

[@DanielSantanaBjj]

Vulnerability 1 - Windows Vulnerability 2 - .bat files Vulnerability 3 - A programmer that wants to run .bat files from his rust code Vulnerability 4 - The specific rare use case mentioned by the CVE

[@arthurmoore9488]

For the 10/10 you need to add: * Must be some sort of server that takes user input * Assume that an exec equivalent parameterize's / sanitizes user input. How is this even a rust CVE? It's a flaw in how cmd.exe parses arguments!

[@jphillips247]

@@arthurmoore9488 I have to respectfully disagree. The & sign to CMD.exe is meant to run the next command after the other is run. This would work whether it was a bat file or some other command that was executed by CMD. No this isn't a 10/10 but it's exactly a command injection bug. To say it is CMD.exe fault would be the same as blaming oracle for command injections.

[@Xankill3r]

@@jphillips247 except Oracle (and other DBs) provide a means to do parametarized args. CMD.exe does not. That's the entire reason that this is more a CMD.exe issue and less of a Rust issue. Even in the classic SQL injection context we didn't really have foolproof (or mostly foolproof) solutions till the query engines natively supported parametarization.

[@itsentdev]

@@jphillips247 the actual problem is developers. nobody blames the SQL language when your server gets hit with an injection attack, Rust provides nice easy APIs to easily remove characters from strings.

[@arthurmoore9488]

@@jphillips247 I was mostly partly being over the top, but not completely. The "safety" guarantee is that arguments are passed to the program being called without run through a shell. That obviously doesn't apply if the program you're running is a shell, like cmd.exe. .bat files are just cmd.exe with a few arguments already added. The difference is in Linux, trying the same command with a ".sh" file gives an error. The executable would have to be "/bin/sh", with the file as an argument. Making it clear that **parameterized**, not escaped, arguments are being passed to a shell. The way many other shells and similar fix this is by treating everything after " -- " (spaces are important) as arguments passed to the script. cmd.exe does not have anything like that, and cannot since it would likely break backwards compatibility. However, even in the Linux example, one of the arguments would have to be " -- " for that to function!

[@2khz]

Agreed, I saw this headline and read into it further and immediately clicked off when I learned of its actual nature.

[@BillAnt]

The only two CVE validators I trust are "Low Level Learning" and "John Hammond". Nuff' said. ;D

[@N....]

I suppose the issue is more related to how Windows executes script files in general, I expect this sort of issue to be present with just about anything that is supported via the ShellExecute or CreateProcess APIs. Every program on Windows is free to parse its command line in any way it sees fit, there's no real concept of arguments or standardized escape sequences for quoted arguments or such, it's all handled on an app-by-app basis and I know for a fact some do not not support any form of escaping. IIRC you can even edit an environment variable to change which file extensions are run by the command processor, which means even if a programming language tried to detect what it thought was happening, it could still be subject to timing attacks.

[@seanhdka]

4:27 rofl

[@hashbrown777]

No this is rusts fault, the issue here is that rust is running your parameters as a part of the command, it matters not at all how the recipient program "is free to parse". You could call a program that doesnt even accept arguments and rust will just run it on the shell. Basically the function is called "arg()" but they actually implemented "appendRawCommandText()" and called it a day :/

[@andrejsk6211]

@@hashbrown777 That's just not true, though. Up to this point Rust escaped the parameters in a way that the standard c argv parsing read them correctly. That's why this is a problem only for running batch files, as those are executed by cmd.exe, which is a special snowflake and requires different argument escaping. Of course, there could be other programs that behave like this on Windows, and the fundamental limitation here is the Windows API itself. One could argue, that the nice Command API with separate arguments should not be available on Windows, because it is impossible to safely implement due to OS limitations.

[@djyotta]

@@andrejsk6211 l agree. The only correct way to sanitize user input is to ensure sanitization is not required. This is why I feel dirty calling methods like "sanatize_for_xyz"...

[@hashbrown777]

​@@andrejsk6211oh this is specific to batch files? Yeah cmd sucks, but this isn't window's fault. Definitely not rust's fault either. If powershell and cygwin dont have the exploit, I'd say disable arg() (runtime exception) when calling a .bat and force people to put it all in the Command call; that'll force them to sanitise themselves

[@georgehelyar]

Guys, i don't want to worry you, but I just found this critical vulnerability where if i execute "shutdown" from rust, my computer turns off. 10/10 CVE.

[@batlin]

I just read the CVE description before coming here and was really surprised to see it rated 10/10. At first I thought I'd misread the description because the mitigating factors (requires you to be executing a Windows batch file AND the attacker has the ability to arbitrarily control the input arguments) are quite strong. I'm not really into Rust, but did find it odd that the vulnerability is making the headlines as somehow specific to Rust, when it's also present in (at least) Erlang (unpatched), Go (unpatched), Haskell, Java ("won't fix"), NodeJS, PHP, Python and Ruby.

[@Couleur]

why run a batchfile with rust..? edit: this is clickbait and not even specific to rust but cmd/batch..?

[@LowLevelTV]

YUP?!

[@bultvidxxxix9973]

So you can write your backend logic in batch and use rust only for the frontend to interface with other things, obviously.

[@DanTDMJace]

One could make a shortcut that runs a batch with Rust.

[@AlbatrossCommando]

I once had to run a inline powershell script in node that converted office files to pdf files. For any sort of situation there is someone who's doing it.

[@hansdampf2284]

Why not?

[@knolljo]

if you are running a windows server, this is probably your least problem

[@virkony]

If I remember correctly DOS/WIndows share that limitation that there is no standard way to quote arguments because it is not a shell that parses them, but a process itself that is spawned by shell. I.e. you'll need to quote depending on which program you run.

[@hashbrown777]

You remember incorrectly. That's how the batch shell works, not win32. PowerShell is free from this issue for example, but absolutely correct regarding cmd.exe, an awful, awful shell environment. The issue now though is that running legacy executables via better abi's becomes tricky because they try to compensate for cmd's poor parsing my doing it themselves, and sometimes you need to deliberately over-escape :/

[@virkony]

@@hashbrown777 I think it is Win32 issue. At least CreateProcessA/GetCommandLineA functions accepts/returns single string instead of array of strings for arguments. Not sure PowerShell can work-around this. Only thing you have is to hope that program that you spawn adheres some standart of encoding arguments in single string. I.e. there is nothing Rust platform library can do right here to implement its API promise. There will be always possibility that some application do not parse its arguments as this library expects.

[@hashbrown777]

@@virkony apparently this is just an issue with calling batch files. So yeah, nothing wrong with win32, but also nothing wrong in rust with calling regular executables.

[@virkony]

@@hashbrown777 Let's imagine that I'm writing regular executable in Win32 API. E.g. I have my WinMain with arguments passed in LPSTR lpCmdLine. As per documentation "The command line for the application, excluding the program name." which means that in that 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐞 string we have all arguments and program name stripped off already for us. As a naïve developer I split it by spaces to get individual arguments. Now tell me: Which tricks Rust can possible take to ensure that this regular Win32 executable accepts as a first argument string with a space? And will it work for all other variations of regular executables?

[@vk3fbab]

I recently submitted some bugs to Microsoft about Windows. I was able to demonstrate how to bypass inTune security controls and execute code that is supposed to be blocked. Because it required local machine access they dismissed it. Then you get this one which also requires local access and somebody else reckons it's the worst thing ever. It's sideways. Rust issue is bad but nowhere near catastrophic. The windows issue i found is not nothing and could be used by malware authors to get their malware to execute when imtune restrictions were supposed to stop it.

[@benoitrousseau4137]

10/10 was the XZ backdoor that shook the FOSS world two weeks ago. I'm not a huge fan of rust myself, but I agree this doesn't look like a 10/10 vulnerability at all.

[@haroldcruz8550]

It may not be 10/10 but it really puts a dent on the 'safety' armor of Rust.

[@Nina-cd2eh]

@@haroldcruz8550 It really doesn't. Rust is supposed to be memory safe, not an enabler for bad choices.

[@ImSquiggs]

Took me way longer than I’d like to admit to realize this doesn’t involve the Steam game Rust, haha.

[@ragectl]

Giving this a 10/10 rating just drops the integrity of the CVSS system. Giving it a CVE is just a process, but this is barely even a bug, it's expected behaviour.

[@tacokoneko]

imo they need to increase the scale to balance the power creep because the XZ backdoor having a 10/10 and then this having a 10/10 also is just silly

[@tacokoneko]

Jia Tan literally botnetted every x86 debian testing and unstable system in the world, but this command injection has compromised absolutely nobody

[@BillAnt]

RUST has just hacked the CVE system by injecting itself indirectly. lol

[@rainthevaporeon7852]

this issue involves failing to sanitize the input and can result in arbitrary code execution, do you expect this be taken lightly

[@yung-megafone]

​@@rainthevaporeon7852 the bug is bad, yes, but it's not a defcon 1 type event. Yes it's a very dangerous bug, but to put it on the same level as XZ is atrocious. Needless to mention the pipeline of events that's required to take place in order for this vulnerability to be exploited is uncommon. Dangerous, but not a backdoor in open source code.

[@oglothenerd]

Is this really a bug? Seems like intended behavior to me.

[@JochCool]

From the first link in the description of the video, the first paragraph: 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.

[@ETBCOR]

had to same thought

[@zombi1034]

I think the issue is that windows implicitly fires up a cmd.exe when you try to run a batch file.

[@ErikBongers]

@@zombi1034 Ah...that would explain why it's only a problem with .bat files.

[@oglothenerd]

@@zombi1034 Ah, I think I see the issue now.

[@commissariomontanaro2931]

basic C shits itself just by watching at it and people get upset that after giving full control to the user, the user exploits the command

[@hansdampf2284]

Every C dev right now: isn’t this doing exactly what it’s supposed to do?

[@stolenlaptop]

Don't forget the C moto. The user knows exactly what they're doing. Stop warning me about mismatching in printf compiler!

[@hashbrown777]

Every bad C dev, sure :| Read the docs on what this function is supposed to do (hint; it wasn't supposed to run arg() on the shell)

[@Xamdify]

@@hashbrown777 If the "application" you are calling is a shell script, then it doesn't matter... This is just not smart, this exploit works the same as if we called a bash file with only echo in it... When calling a shell script (batch or bash or sh, watever you want) it will call the shell to execute it with the parameters given to the script... How else do you want to execute a shell script?

[@hashbrown777]

@@Xamdify then that's an exploit in your called application? Counter, what if you're not calling a shell, you know, just calling tar, the arguments shouldn't ever see a shell, what are you even on about

[@Xamdify]

@@hashbrown777 That is the point, the bug happens when you specifically call a shell script... not when you use other applications... Why do you think the example uses a batch script?

[@AK-vx4dy]

Why this is marked as bug in Rust? It is not bug in rust. This bug in library and i don't know how to expliot it remote? You must write some service wich runs bat...

[@AK-vx4dy]

@@leeroyjenkins0 as i see it on video is mostly escaping problem or windows api wich expects concatenated string instead of two separate or maybe low familiarity of author with windows, but... still i saw rust praised for behaving well and keeping sane compatibility between systems comparing with go where situation is messy puting it lightly... Still i think this only exploitable if you are a github and must run windows scripts as a part of ci/cd or github actions... and maybe if some one writes some installation tool but still remote exploit is hard

[@stzi7691]

@@leeroyjenkins0 yes you are right, but just call the name: it's DOS.

[@ItzPXP9]

Awesome video! It is already fixed in Rust 1.77.2

[@Blaineworld]

- problem found in thing i like - see? thing you like BAD!!! - thing i like gets fixed anyway - mfw

[@abdirahmann]

4:24 yeah windows! Hide your children, am soo dead 🤣🤣🤣💀

[@lesto12321]

Isnt this issue common to many languages and actually unfixable due to the custom parsing logic in windows? The "fix" is actually just a mitigation

[@_modiX]

Also, if the input is the user who run the binary, then it's not even a high risk operation. To be so bad as it sounds, the input actually also needs to be taken from a source that is not controlled by the admin and it is very unlikely that someone has written a program that fetches from arguments from an untrusted source and sends those as arguments to a batch file call. Might be out there in the wild, but I agree, this is far from 10/10.

[@nordgaren2358]

This is more of a bug with batch than anything. Wtf is with the CVE system these days?!?

[@GDKepler]

you would expect Command::new("thing").arg("arg") to work in the way the execl/execvp functions do, where the shell is not involved in parsing the args. Do windows batch files only accept args in one long string or something or does rust just not bother and concatenate the args in a call to the shell?

[@slimeistdev]

I don't thinks it's in issue of how batch files accept args, but the fact that batch files are *shell scripts* and are therefore executed by (to simplify it) string-replacing in the passed argument (which hasn't been touched by the 'outer (parent-process)' shell that the rust program was launched by) into the %1, and then letting an 'inner (child-process)' shell run each line of the batch file. This is (as others have said elsewhere in the comments) exactly the same behaviour you'd expect if you invoked a linux .sh file from rust - it would spawn /bin/sh (or whatever shell you have on your system) to execute the .sh file, with all the standard shell vulnerabilities. From what I can tell, this CVE seems to be addressing the fact that the docs state that the arguments will be passed directly to the child process without handling by the 'outer' shell, and not thinking of the fact that rust can't (and shouldn't) prevent you from spawning a child process which then itself (in this case being a shell) has unsafe argument handling. Hope that clears it up! Edit: looks like this was fixed in Rust 1.77.2, here's the official explanation: blog.rust-lang.org/2024/04/09/cve-2024-24576.html#overview

[@ruroruro]

@@slimeistdev your explanation makes no sense. Command::new("./test.sh").arg(user_controlled_string) with echo $1 in test.sh is perfectly safe on POSIX compliant systems, so why should .bat on windows be any different. This is 100% an unexpected foot gun.

[@slimeistdev]

@@ruroruro Hm... Seems like I was wrong to assume that POSIX shell scripts would have the same issue. I totally agree that this is an unexpected foot gun, but it seems to me to be (or should be) more of cmd.exe's responsibility than rust's. Still good to see rust trying to protect us from ourselves :)

[@lukeskywalker2116]

This is just the rust version of the c “system” call. We’ve known about input validation for what 40 years now?

[@pepeshopping]

“Memory safe” never meant “security safe!”.

[@Graphene_314]

The true vulnerability is Windows.

[@no_name4796]

Not even a joke Windows itself is spyware and i don't trust they don't actually have malware or backdoors in it. Linux for the win

[@theblckbird]

This

[@florianmartingrimm8055]

its not windows you can do this also with linux or any other os

[@RagHelen]

Golden shower for Rust.

[@OrbitalCookie]

Critical vulterability in ALL programming languages! The programmer might USE THEM incorrectly!

[@lemonjumpsofficial]

I honestly hate how ppl praise rust to be "safe" it's not, it's really not, no language is, your program is going to be as safe as you make it, no matter what you wrote it in. rust is type safe, rust is memory safe. AND THAT'S IT. you'll still get race conditions, you'll still get rce, you'll get crashes, there's nothing qbout rust that makes it safer than other languages. *explodes* anyway, pleaeeeese don't expect something else to be safe for you, always make it safe your self

[@The472k]

Thank you for the breakdown! This was very helpful for me to understand the topic. Better than articles I've read about it ;)

[@yeetyeet7070]

How is unchecked user input a LANGUAGE PROBLEM? In C that is a feature. From what you explained, it works exactly how it is intended. It's up to the programmer to validate their inputs, like what?

[@username17234]

The standard programatic way to pass arguments to a shell command is not sanitizing the input, not even quotes, and that hadn't been caught before?

[@SashikaSandeepa]

Is this a vulnerability i did something like this with using python os.system i didn't know it was a vulnerability. I thought developer need to filter the user input before passing it.

[@staviq]

Sure, and flammable things can self ignite if you set them on fire. Somebody should register wood as CVE-69-420, because it's clearly extremely dangerous.

[@mr.bulldops7692]

This is mentioned in the docs for the impl of Command::arg(). Not sure when this was added, but is specifically calls out .bat file args as vectors for malicious attacks. It then gives instructions for using `raw_arg` for implementing non-standard arg encoding. Anyone know more?

[@fxshlein]

I think the 10/10 might be supposed to mean "this is critical when using Command in rust and passing user provided arguments to it", not "this is critical when using rust". The score tells you how bad it is if you're vulnerable. This is a very annoying part of the scoring system, because if you have dependency scanning, you get annoying critical alerts all the time for stuff you're not vulnerable to in 99% of cases. But it has to work like this to alert the 1% that are vulnerable. The rest just hast to ignore the alert.

[@test-rj2vl]

I don't understand how is it Rust's problem? I can write this in C++, python, Java whatever I want. The problem is between monitor and chair in case of such code.

[@rbda8921]

What a fancy way to say skill issue

[@alex-costantino]

if I want to pass some batch instructions as args, how I do it if they sanitize it by default

[@ArcWeltraumpert]

Hopefully after this video, many people will realize not to worship and deify rust anymore.

[@jcdevelopment696]

For the people complaining about it being 10.0 CVE. There is not a group of people arbitrarily setting a score for a vulnerability, they are graded based on CVSS 3.1 vectors which are the following Attack Vector (AV) Attack Complexity (AC) Privileges Required (PR) User Interaction (UI) Scope (S) Impact Metrics: Confidentiality Impact (C) Integrity Impact (I) Availability Impact (A) AV: Yes it is remote, thus contributing to a higher score. AC: Low complexity PR: No privilege required UI: Does not need to involve human interaction. S: It does change scopes, it goes from executing within the application to the OS, that is a change of scope. The impact metrics are all compromised since it can run system commands. So for people not thinking this is not a 10.0, please argue which of these are values should change. One could argue that the system will have a larger bias towards command injection since it automatically ticks all the impact metrics and often the scope too, but that is an entirely other discussion.

[@tserica]

I think the 10/10 is warranted, but maybe not the level of focus on Rust. It is notable because Rust has such a focus on security, but a lot of languages got this wrong because the Windows API for doing this is kinda broken. Meaning, there isn't a safe way to do it in Windows at all without the caller going to extreme lengths. There's only so much a caller can do about a bad underlying API.

[@florianmartingrimm8055]

convert that bat to bash and run it on linux. it's not rust, windows nor linux fault

[@noodlish]

I still don't understand how this is remotely triggerable? Does that assume something like a web app would accept user input and pass it to this function?

[@wodxgod]

yes

[@Raaampage]

Yes I don't really get a practical use of this either.

[@Knirin]

Almost every web app that controls a virtual machine, process, or piece of industrial hardware does exactly that.

[@sas408]

@@Knirin they use .bat files? On Linux?

[@Knirin]

@@sas408 shell scripts and bat files are the same concept. I was more referring to the number of things like cpanel and cockpit that directly call other executables with user input.

[@rekall76]

presumably there's a standard function that can be wrapped around the call to .arg() that escapes characters that would allow 'breaking out' of a command with quotes?

[@cianmoriarty7345]

Literally the purpose of system() in almost all languages is to run commands though. Which is why you must be super careful in calling it and must never pass unchecked user input into it unless you literally are wanting to write a shell that runs with current permissions. With all that entails. Sounds more like a feature than a bug.

[@MrMate91]

The new KZbin arrangement of recommendations and comments rated 10/10 from me...

[@jose-lael]

That’s why the government was endorsing it.

[@J-wm4ss]

nah this can happen in c, and c has 100x more ways to end up with RCE.

[@rusi6219]

@@J-wm4ss of course it can happen in C and nobody cares because C is a real programming language designed for real developers not for LGBT therapy victims like rust

[@jose-lael]

@@J-wm4ssI was joking. But as a systems language, it *should* be possible in C. I’m not onboard with the ‘safety enforced by language semantics’ nonsense. Natively enforced safety is censorship.

[@phoenixsec]

really good summary !

[@_daniel.w]

I really thought something bad happened, oh well. At least I found an RCE (or ACE in singleplayer) in a game I play the other week. Started learning a bit more about exploitation since that, it's a great topic

[@alastor--radiodemon7556]

So when a user at their chair using their computer gets a terminal prompt and recives control for input....they can use their conputer to run their own commands on their computer?

[@Ma1ne2]

Hey man, been watching your videos for a long time now, wanted to give a constructive idea for your intro: These days you're starting with "Hi, my name is LowLevelLearning and " which I think is the right idea to draw in new viewers and grow the channel. I just think a different wording would make it even stronger in the direction of: "Hi, my name is , this is LowLevelLearning where we ." I find this more approachable personally and I feel this more clearly introduces you as a person as well as the reason why you're running this channel. It's your baby of course and your call, just wanted to share this thought since I had it a few times now when watching your videos! Cheers, thanks for always fun and informative content!

[@MikkoRantalainen]

CVSS scores are interesting because recent XZ Utils backdoor was rated as 10/10, too, but it was 10 only for the attacker that knows the not-yet-published private key that matches the public key in the backdoor. For everybody else the CVSS score should have been maybe 3/10 because the backdoor can be used to increase CPU load and cause remote DoS because of consuming CPU resources.

[@1cubealot]

How is this different than doing Command::new("rm -rf /* --no-preserve-root")?

[@martinsavc3202]

How is the command ran? How is a new process spawned? In Linux I would expect this kind of functionality to be implemented with fork and exec sys calls, the "arg" never touches a shell and is passed directly to the executed command as a list of strings. No sanitation necessary (as far as shell command injection is concerned).

[@anonymousalexander6005]

Who would have thought that allowing unsanitized user input into a console call would result in a vulnerability 😱. No seriously, if you get bit by this somehow I'm sorry but maybe you only should ever touch user-facing code again after at least a couple more years of mentorship. There never was guarantees of sanitation and you have to run console interpreter in order to run .bat or .cmd files, this is just a non-bug I'm sorry

[@hashbrown777]

It's not a console call.. it's ".arg()", it literally guarantees sanitisation. You're running a Command(), not calling a Shell() You're confused, Rust is absolutely exhibiting a bug here

[@bradywb98]

Can you disambiguate between your usage of Shell and Command here?

[@arthurmoore9488]

@@hashbrown777 No, it grantees **parameterization**. Calling cmd.exe with parameterized commands is dangerous. Who knew!?!

[@arthurmoore9488]

@bradywb98 I can probably help. Broadly speaking, "executable" is a binary program of machine instructions, "Command" is whatever is being asked to run, and, in this context "Shell" is something that runs a script. The confusion is that "Command" does NOT always mean "Executable". It does on Linux, but on Windows attempting to run anything but a ".exe" file causes it to run whatever program is associated with that file. So calling `Command::new("./test.bat")` is really the same as calling `Command::new("cmd.exe")`

[@AbstractObserver]

I will be honest.... this literally looks like as WORKING AS INTENDED. You are writting a bat file and telling windows to run it... I see literally nothing wrong here except the developer who decided to write this absurd code.

[@firepyro1281]

I agree, I'm confused how this is considered a bug in rust when it seems like typical lack of sanitization issues. Was the expectation that it would be sanitized for you?

[@ME0WMERE]

@@firepyro1281 Yes. `arg()` says in its documentation that any string you give it is passed as-is without the shell evaluating it. So this is a bug, it's just not as severe as github makes it out to be.

[@georgehelyar]

​@@ME0WMERE so if you use Command to run bash on Linux that's a bug in rust on Linux because it's running a shell, when the docs say it isn't running a shell? To me the docs are just saying it's passed through without modification, which is correct.

[@Comeyd]

@@ME0WMERE No, you still have to be aware of what you're calling is doing with the input! This does not absolve you, the developer, of responsibility of knowing what the heck is actually going on! You can *literally* do the exact same "exploit" on Linux, but it requires, you, the developer, to be an idiot. Never trust user input! That's literally lesson #1 of anything "security" related!

[@stzi7691]

Yup, there is nothing wrong with the executable. Rust is a systems programming language, man. The problem is that an operating system should be well structured with user priviledges so that it simply forbids execution of specific commands that are priviledge to root. And every sysadming that just runs downloaded programs without checking things should be fired. But hey, most companies like windows that still runs on an idiotic "dirty operating system" that never get's updated and is written badly. It's ensuring IT jobs.

[@gameprogramme]

I understand and agree with your concerns about the rating. Though I am merely an armchair observer with no direct insight into the CVE decision-making process or affiliation with any involved entities, I believe I can offer a useful perspective. Perhaps adopting an ‘a+b/20’ scoring system could better differentiate between bug severity and likelihood of exploitability. This approach could be analogous to the FAA’s ‘Swiss cheese’ model, which is used to understand how random, primarily accidental factors align to cause air disasters. In contrast, computer security usually deals with honest mistakes that align to allow usually malignant actors to forcibly breach systems. Given the high severity of the bug but largely theoretical exploitability, the 10/10 rating might seem excessive. It is essential for anyone executing unsanitized data on Windows from an untrusted source to assess their application for potential impacts. This vulnerability requires a very specific set of circumstances to be exploitable, which suggests that while all developers should check their code, the real-world risk might be less immediate than the rating suggests.

[@Kevin-Lam]

Hi everyone ! I don't understand exactly the difference between this rust example of the vulnerability and the C example of command injection, like in both example in C and Rust work the same. By that i mean, does it just mean that rust has the same vulnerabilities as C ?

[@paljain01]

It's crazy the backdoor and this has the same cve rating.

[@thomaslindell5448]

Why not refer the input and trim shell args before acting on the string

[@Sypaka]

This can happen in normal batchfiles as well. This sound more like a programmer error by skipping any string sanitation. This is how SQL injections work, too. I think they set this as CVE, because people make servers in Rust and this oversight _may_ affect them. It's more like a warning for bad coding then an actual vulnerability.

[@0marble8]

I think its a cve in the same way that "press 1 to rm rf /" program is a cve?

[@TECHN01200]

I don't understand how this is a CVE. If this is a CVE, then C should be riddled with nothing but CVEs. For context, I hate writing rust, I hate the rust foundation, I hate the obnoxious "rewrite it in rust" and "the only valid thing to write software in is rust" parrots, but this is asinine.

[@krtirtho]

When I hear 10/10, I hear "Remote vulnerability, remote execution, it's everywhere, xz backdoor, https noodles butter cup attack..."

[@mytechnotalent]

Using C without dynamic memory allocation is just as much a proper solution as any unsafe Rust hack.

[@rusi6219]

It's a more proper solution because it's legal in the language whereas Rust uses unsafe specifically to allow you to do things the compiler deems illegal

[@burnin8orable]

The good thing is that there are ways to prevent this vulnerability by sanitizing input and avoiding calling command lines from your program. Also, validate user input with a regex.

[@PixelThorn]

So rust is no better than c++

[@NekoApril]

​@@PixelThornNo, it just means that you still can't implicitly trust the user. This is true no matter the language

[@brod515]

@@PixelThorn yeah I know right? When I realized that rust won't protect me from downloading malware from my computer I was extremely disappointed. but the final straw was when it occurred to me that rust wouldn't even make me any safer on a plane than the other non-rust passengers.

[@rico_1617]

​@@brod515golden lmao. Idk what this guy wants from a language

[@d-o-n-u-t]

The problem is that the whole point of .arg() is to sanitize the input, and this is the behavior across all other platforms except for Windows when running a BAT file.

[@lspcie]

Last video I watched from you was how much better Rust is (than C) as it has all the security management built in 😅

[@lspcie]

@@tiranito2834 of course, exactly the reason why the OP has a point that the CVE level is overblown

[@rusi6219]

@@tiranito2834 rust devs rely on the same magic that tells them man can be woman and vice versa

[@anon-fz2bo]

comment section full of knowledegable ppl man, love this channel & people who are willing to share knowledge!

[@vladomaimun]

The injected commands are run with the same privileges as the rust binary, correct? So for a hacker to gain anything from this vulnerability either there needs to be a rust binary that both runs with admin privileges and has this vulnerability or that the vulnerable rust program gets the command arguments from somewhere else that is controlled by the hacker. So only some rust programs that use the Command function in a specific way are vulnerable and not every Windows machine that runs any rust code as the article title and the CVE score make it seem.

[@Yawhatnever]

You don't need admin privileges to steal information. You could yoink the database password, dump the entire DB, or do any of a thousand other things. Attackers can be pretty creative.

[@kuhluhOG]

I have a theory why it's classified as 10/10: For some reason a sizeable chunk of Rust devs view Rust as a silverbullet to nearly all (if not even sometime literally all) security problems. I hope that they are a minority, but they exist. And I can't comprehend why they exist, but I had some interactions with them. So, maybe this is classified as a 10/10 to "shake them". Not a fan of (ab)using CVEs for this, but could be the case.

[@arthurmoore9488]

Counterpoint. Maybe the person who assigned the score is one of those people who thinks rust should be a silver bullet. So anything that breaks that illusion must be off the charts bad.

[@Aim54Delta]

​@@arthurmoore9488 That is more my take. The rust community is one giant script kiddie struggle session where everyone admits to having no idea what they are doing or how they ended up in front of a computer terminal. It's a bit of a shame. The goal of rust is great for teams working on high liability code where vulnerabilities must be minimized. But it's being glommed onto by a bunch of people who never belonged in programming or networking in the first place. The industry is rife with posers. I won't get into it too deep, but a friend of mine has been a NOC coordinator for a while and we've done penetration testing of various systems.... There's a lot of people, "very reputable", who can't even handle user account settings and basic features of their software suites, much less deal with software vulnerabilities.

[@seeibe]

I always thought the point of rust was the speed of C with the memory safety of JavaScript.. anyone using JavaScript knows that you can still write insecure code.

[@kuhluhOG]

@@seeibe yes, that is the point (although one can still write memory leaks in (safe) Rust and some other problems) but some people think differently for some stupid reason

[@JochCool]

You know that the score is calculated based on objective criteria right? It's not just one guy saying whatever number sounds nice to them

[@johnredberg]

By that CVE's argument, shouldn't what you showed in the beginning in C also be a 10/10 critical vulnerability? OMG, stdlib's system() function is BROKEN!!!!!!

[@Comeyd]

Indeed! that's what is ridiculous about it. It's a silly "proof of concept" of which there is no "solution" that can be implemented to "protect" Rust from this "exploit." The real issue is the "developer" trusted user input! Huge mistake!

[@Jason9637]

The first example is clearly unsanitized, however rust's std library said that arguments were passed directly to the program and so special chars didn't do anything. It was just recently updated to mention that Windows has weirdness with argument encoding that it can cause issues with unsafe input.

[@Comeyd]

@@Jason9637 The docs said it wasn't evaluated by a shell, they are passed directly to the "command" being invoked. You still need to be aware of what the "command" is actually doing though!

[@arthurmoore9488]

@@Comeyd The docs need something like "unless the command being invoked is a shell (duh)" and "the command being invoked for shell scripts is a shell (obviously)".

[@peter9477]

At this point, merely using C is basically a 10/10.

[@mudi2000a]

How is that even a vulnerability?

[@OganySupreme]

How would you rate this vulnerability out of 10? I'm curious, I have very little security experience.

[@florianmartingrimm8055]

all programming langiages can do that - that's nuts

[@Veptis]

This made me realize that I have some really risky and unsanitized calls to subproess that totally could be epxloited... And its even remote to some extend . Maybe I should add eords of caution and provide a sandbox. Would have been great if you can show the logic error in the rust source and how to mitigate it. Since thats the information I kinda require to do better myself

[@existenceisillusion6528]

"I know, Windows, hide your children!" 🤣Took me a solid minute to recover from that.

[@mattiviljanen8109]

Doesn't this affect calling any executables, not just batch files?

[@michawhite7613]

Nope. Windows is so decrepit that the program being called (for batch programs, cmd.exe) gets to decide how escaping works.

[@Knirin]

@@michawhite7613 The same behavior can be triggered with any shell if the shell script isn’t written properly. Though cmd.exe may not have proper sanitization options in batch files.

[@rusi6219]

@@michawhite7613 hahaha totally a windows issue let's all just start writing unsafe code then blame it on "decrepit OS not escaping characters on its own"

[@michawhite7613]

@@rusi6219 It literally happens on every programming language on Windows. You can do it in Python, C#, Java, Node.js, etc. As of now, Rust is the only language where you *can't* get this vulnerability.

[@rusi6219]

@@michawhite7613 you literally can get this vulnerability on Rust and it's why we are even discussing it now LOL classic rustrany

[@shapelessed]

I feel like this vulnerability got so much fuss about it is because of logging. Many projects straight up log everything that happens in their code. Imagine you have user login and each successful request logs their email or username. You could easily use that for RCE.

[@Marco-sz6mq]

I cannot understand the difference between the C and Rust code. Isn't the exact same issue? No checks on the input provided by the user (both snippets) and run external code (os.system vs running the bat).

[@tensorgod]

What keyboard are you using! Sounds amazing 😃

[@nicolasteylor]

Can someone explain me why it is called a vulnerability? You ask the user to enter the text and pass this text to cmd. What else was going to happen?

[@b.bergeron8769]

Brother I'm a C apologist and I agree that's utterly silly. That's barely a vulnerability!

[@abdirahmann]

C apologist?! 😂😂😂😂💀

[@CEOofGameDev]

this is kinda silly. If I ever have some code that runs a batch file, I'd be more concerned with someone substituting the batch file...

[@NabilStendardo]

As I understand, the severity of this vulnerability is contingent on the existence of one or more applications written in Rust, who can take input from random users across the internet and use that input as an argument of Command with the implied assumption that sanitization is part of the contract of the function... if such applications exist and are widespread, then it is 10/10. Otherwise it's just purely theoretical.

[@elizabethharasymiw7025]

I was curious since you made it clear that you think it should not be a 10/10 what rating would you have it changed to instead, and why?

[@mrdiamond64]

5:20 This issue isn't exclusive to Rust, is it? I tested a while ago that if you echo a string in Batch that contains ampersands then it will run the code. You can even try it yourself by using this script and typing "& whoami". ``` @echo off :: Ask the user for input set /p name=What is your name? echo Your name is %name% ````

[@mac.ignacio]

PHP is shaking on its knees now.

[@ayeayepost]

That is not a bug in the laguage, that is a bug in its library.

[@iduran]

Hey man, probably you get this boring question all the time, but what is the vim colorscheme in this video, resembles solarized but it is not for sure. Btw, great content. Thanks in advance!

[@tiggerbiggo]

To me this seems very similar to a sql injection. It only appears if you use the software in a specific way. Nobody is calling the very use of SQL a 10/10 security risk just because if you set it up in a certain way you can allow for injection attacks.

[@CoolestPossibleName]

Is it ok to use scanf like that?

[@jkennethking]

Agree. Maybe part of the hype is because of how hard Rust evangelists push the language as the "secure" language (compared to C)? Some people really lean into this fantasy that when you program in Rust you don't have to worry about security and CVEs will be a thing of the past.

[@rusi6219]

It's also funny that Rust is not even comparable to C. Maybe you could compare it to C++ and the only Rust could be estimated to be the "better" language is due to C++ constantly adding unnecessary features.

[@alkeryn1700]

this is not a rust vulnerability or rust specific, this is a windows vulnerability that affect a pletora of languages.