High-Severity Rust Programming Bug Could Lead to File, Directory Deletion

The maintainers of the Rust programming language have unveiled a security update for a significant-severity vulnerability that could be abused by a malicious party to purge files and directories from a vulnerable program in an unauthorized manner.

“An attacker could use this security issue to trick a privileged software into deleting information and directories the attacker couldn’t usually accessibility or delete,” the Rust Security Response doing work group (WG) explained in an advisory published on January 20, 2021.

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Rust 1.. through Rust 1.58. is impacted by this vulnerability. The flaw, which is tracked as CVE-2022-21658 (CVSS rating: 7.3), has been credited to security researcher Hans Kratz, with the group pushing out a fix in Rust variation 1.58.1 shipped final week.

Particularly, the issue stems from an improperly executed check to protect against recursive deletion of symbolic one-way links (aka symlinks) in a common library operate named “std::fs::remove_dir_all.” This effects in a race situation, which, in transform, could be reliably exploited by an adversary by abusing their obtain to a privileged program to delete sensitive directories.

“Instead of telling the procedure not to abide by symlinks, the normal library to start with checked no matter if the issue it was about to delete was a symlink, and usually it would commence to recursively delete the directory,” the advisory reported. “This exposed a race condition: an attacker could produce a listing and replace it with a symlink concerning the check out and the genuine deletion.”

Rust, although not a extensively-employed programming language, has witnessed a surge in adoption in current years for its memory-associated protection guarantees. Last year, Google introduced that its open up-resource variation of the Android operating method will add guidance for the programming language to protect against memory protection bugs.

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