CVE-2024-24576: std::process::Command did not properly escape arguments of batch files on Windows

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Pietro Albini

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Apr 9, 2024, 1:00:43 PMApr 9
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The Rust Security Response WG was notified that the Rust standard library did
not properly escape arguments when invoking batch files (with the `bat` and
`cmd` extensions) on Windows using the [`Command`][1] API. 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** if you are invoking batch
files on Windows with untrusted arguments. No other platform or use is
affected.

This vulnerability is identified by CVE-2024-24576.

## Overview

The [`Command::arg`][2] and [`Command::args`][3] 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 thorough enough,
and it was possible to pass malicious arguments that would result in arbitrary
shell execution.

## Mitigations

Due to the complexity of `cmd.exe`, we didn't identify a solution that would
correctly escape arguments in all cases. To maintain our API guarantees, we
improved the robustness of the escaping code, and changed the `Command` API to
return an [`InvalidInput`][4] error when it cannot safely escape an argument.
This error will be emitted when spawning the process.

The fix will be included in Rust 1.77.2, to be released later today.

If you implement the escaping yourself or only handle trusted inputs, on
Windows you can also use the [`CommandExt::raw_arg`][5] method to bypass the
standard library's escaping logic.

## Affected Versions

All Rust versions before 1.77.2 on Windows are affected, if your code or one of
your dependencies executes batch files with untrusted arguments. Other
platforms or other uses on Windows are not affected.

## Acknowledgments

We want to thank RyotaK for responsibly disclosing this to us according to the
[Rust security policy][6], and Simon Sawicki (Grub4K) for identifying some of
the escaping rules we adopted in our fix.

We also want to thank the members of the Rust project who helped us disclose
the vulnerability: Chris Denton for developing the fix; Mara Bos for reviewing
the fix; Pietro Albini for writing this advisory; Pietro Albini, Manish
Goregaokar and Josh Stone for coordinating this disclosure; Amanieu d'Antras
for advising during the disclosure.

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/process/struct.Command.html
[2]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/process/struct.Command.html#method.arg
[3]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/process/struct.Command.html#method.args
[4]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/io/enum.ErrorKind.html#variant.InvalidInput
[5]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/os/windows/process/trait.CommandExt.html#tymethod.raw_arg
[6]: https://www.rust-lang.org/policies/security
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