Critical Rust Vulnerability Let Hackers Inject Commands on Windows Systems

A new critical vulnerability has been discovered in two of the Rust standard libraries, which could allow a threat actor to execute shell commands on vulnerable versions.

This vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2024-24576, and its severity has been given as 10.0 (Critical).

In this report, Rust Security Response stated that they have not identified a solution yet but have created a workaround to mitigate this vulnerability.

This vulnerability was credited to RyotaK and Simon Sawicki (Grub4K) for helping them fix it.

Critical Rust Vulnerability

According to the reports shared with Cyber Security News, this vulnerability exists due to insufficient validation of arguments passed to Command::arg and Command::args APIs. 

The documentation of these two APIs states that the arguments passed to the APIs directly to the spawned process, and it will not be evaluated by a shell.

In addition, the implementation of these two APIs is complicated due to the fact that the Windows API passes all of the provided arguments as a single string, leaving the splitting process with the spawned process.

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However, the cmd.exe process has a different splitting logic in Windows as it forces the standard library to perform the escaping for the arguments.

Nevertheless, this escaping sequence was not sufficiently validated, making it easier for threat actors to pass malicious arguments to the spawned process to execute arbitrary shell code. 

As a means of mitigating this vulnerability, Rust Security response team improved the escaping code with strong implementations and has made the Command API to return an InvalidInput error if it cannot safely escape any argument. 

Moreover, this error will be thrown during the process of spawning. For Windows users, the CommandExt::raw_arg method can be used to bypass the standard library’s escaping logic used by the cmd.exe process. 

Affected Versions And Fix

This vulnerability affects all the Rust versions earlier than 1.77.2 on Windows if any code or dependencies execute batch files with untrusted arguments.

Other platforms are not affected by this vulnerability.

To fix this, the Rust Security response team has recommended upgrading Rust to the latest version, 1.77.2, to prevent any unauthorized malicious threat actors from exploiting this vulnerability.

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