CVE-2022-36114 Extracting malicious crates can fill the file system

What is CVE-2022-36114?

CVE-2022-36114 is a medium-severity denial of service 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. It was discovered that Cargo did not limit the amount of data extracted from compressed archives. An attacker could upload to an alternate registry a specially crafted package that extracts way more data than its size (also known as a "zip bomb"), exhausting the disk space on the machine using Cargo to download 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. We recommend users of alternate registries to excercise 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 excercise care in choosing their dependencies though, as the same concerns about build scripts and procedural macros apply here.

Weakness: CWE-400

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-36114?

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

Products include Rust-Lang Cargo.

How do I fix CVE-2022-36114?

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

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2022-36114 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-36114 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-2022-36113 Extracting malicious crates can corrupt arbitrary files Medium 4.6
• 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-2022-36114, GHSA-2hvr-h6gw-qrxp, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-36114.