CVE-2022-36113 Extracting malicious crates can corrupt arbitrary files

What is CVE-2022-36113?

CVE-2022-36113 is a medium-severity path traversal vulnerability in rust-lang cargo, published on 14 Sep 2022. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

Cargo is a package manager for the rust programming language. After a package is downloaded, Cargo extracts its source code in the ~/.cargo folder on disk, making it available to the Rust projects it builds. To record when an extraction is successful, Cargo writes "ok" to the .cargo-ok file at the root of the extracted source code once it extracted all the files. It was discovered that Cargo allowed packages to contain a .cargo-ok symbolic link, which Cargo would extract. Then, when Cargo attempted to write "ok" into .cargo-ok, it would actually replace the first two bytes of the file the symlink pointed to with ok. This would allow an attacker to corrupt one file on the machine using Cargo to extract the package. Note that by design Cargo allows code execution at build time, due to build scripts and procedural macros. The vulnerabilities in this advisory allow performing a subset of the possible damage in a harder to track down way. Your dependencies must still be trusted if you want to be protected from attacks, as it's possible to perform the same attacks with build scripts and procedural macros. The vulnerability is present in all versions of Cargo. Rust 1.64, to be released on September 22nd, will include a fix for it. Since the vulnerability is just a more limited way to accomplish what a malicious build scripts or procedural macros can do, we decided not to publish Rust point releases backporting the security fix. Patch files are available for Rust 1.63.0 are available in the wg-security-response repository for people building their own toolchain. Mitigations We recommend users of alternate registries to exercise care in which package they download, by only including trusted dependencies in their projects. Please note that even with these vulnerabilities fixed, by design Cargo allows arbitrary code execution at build time thanks to build scripts and procedural macros: a malicious dependency will be able to cause damage regardless of these vulnerabilities. crates.io implemented server-side checks to reject these kinds of packages years ago, and there are no packages on crates.io exploiting these vulnerabilities. crates.io users still need to exercise care in choosing their dependencies though, as remote code execution is allowed by design there as well.

Weakness: CWE-59, CWE-22

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-36113?

4 open source packages ship an affected version, including cargo. It affects 1 product.

Products include Rust-Lang Cargo.

How do I fix CVE-2022-36113?

Upgrade cargo to a fixed version for your release line: 0.65.0 or 0.67.0.

Upgrade, and resolve every user-supplied path against an allowed base folder before opening it. More about Path traversal.

Is CVE-2022-36113 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-36113 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in rust-lang cargo

• CVE-2026-5223 Crates in third party registries can override the cached source of other crates Medium 6.5
• CVE-2022-46176 Cargo did not verify SSH host keys Medium 5.3
• CVE-2022-36114 Extracting malicious crates can fill the file system Medium 4.8
• CVE-2026-5222 Cargo can be coerced to share credentials between registries Low 2.3

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2022-36113, GHSA-rfj2-q3h3-hm5j, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-36113.