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Fencer Vulns
medium 4.6

CVE-2022-36113 json

Extracting malicious crates can corrupt arbitrary files

published 2022-09-14 4 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also GHSA-rfj2-q3h3-hm5j , EUVD-2022-6934

cvss
4.6
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.3%
EPSS 1.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 70%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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.

Patch / fix

  • crates.io cargo 0.65.0, 0.67.0
  • rust-lang cargo 0.65.0
  • cargo Debian 12 0.63.1-1
  • rust-cargo Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 0.66.0-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2022-36113

  • cargo Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 0.67.1+ds0ubuntu0.libgit2-0ubuntu0.20.04.2
  • cargo Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 0.67.1+ds0ubuntu0.libgit2-0ubuntu0.22.04.2

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2022-36113

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • rust1.62 SLE Module for Development Tools 15 SP4, SLE Module for Development Tools 15 SP3, openSUSE Leap 15.4 +1 more 1.62.1-150300.7.7.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2022:3451-1

  • rust1.62 openSUSE Tumbleweed 1.62.1-3.1
  • rust1.63 openSUSE Tumbleweed 1.63.0-3.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:12343-1openSUSE-SU-2024:12344-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2022-36113 updated cvss 5.4

rust-cargo: multiple vulnerabilities

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
18 mo ago

Exploit prediction

1.29% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 70% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 4.6 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:L
NVD 3.1 8.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H
GitHub 3.1 3.9 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:L

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
crates.io cargo
<0.65.0
>=0.66.0, <0.67.0
0.65.0
0.67.0

Affected products

  • rust-lang cargo

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-22 Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory
  • CWE-59 Improper Link Resolution Before File Access

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.