48
Security advisory for the standard library (CVE-2024-24576)
(blog.rust-lang.org)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
48 points (98.0% liked)
Rust
5980 readers
73 users here now
Welcome to the Rust community! This is a place to discuss about the Rust programming language.
Wormhole
Credits
- The icon is a modified version of the official rust logo (changing the colors to a gradient and black background)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I'm thinking an xz-style attack where a malicious actor submits an "improvement" with an innocuous-looking change to the build script that ends up running arbitrary commands. Running a batch script seems like a reasonable thing for a build script to do (e.g. to run something like i18n or whatever), and a lot of project devs may not know much about how batch scripts work (many devs are more familiar with Linux-compatible shell scripts), so it could slip through. The batch script itself could be innocuous and thus not be caught by a reviewer.
But there is no reason to use a script, when you have a build.rs anyways. Since pretty much everything the script can do build.rs can do better.
That's not going to be particularly feasible when generating bindings and other complex build processes. For example, the Qt bindings run shell commands as part of the build.rs. As does gettext-rs.
So I don't think it's unreasonable to think a developer could sneak in an exploit with "temporary code" to improve some part of the build process on Windows.