A bug in the SmallVec::insert_many method caused it to allocate a buffer that was smaller than needed. It then wrote past the end of the buffer, causing a buffer overflow and memory corruption on the heap.

This bug was only triggered if the iterator passed to insert_many yielded more items than the lower bound returned from its size_hint method.

The flaw was corrected in smallvec 0.6.14 and 1.6.1, by ensuring that additional space is always reserved for each item inserted. The fix also simplified the implementation of insert_many to use less unsafe code, so it is easier to verify its correctness.

Thank you to Yechan Bae (@Qwaz) and the Rust group at Georgia Tech’s SSLab for finding and reporting this bug.

The following presentation at this year's DEF CON was brought to our attention on the SQLx Discord:

SQL Injection isn't Dead: Smuggling Queries at the Protocol Level
http://web.archive.org/web/20240812130923/https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2032/DEF%20CON%2032%20presentations/DEF%20CON%2032%20-%20Paul%20Gerste%20-%20SQL%20Injection%20Isn't%20Dead%20Smuggling%20Queries%20at%20the%20Protocol%20Level.pdf
(Archive link for posterity.)

Essentially, encoding a value larger than 4GiB can cause the length prefix in the protocol to overflow, causing the server to interpret the rest of the string as binary protocol commands or other data.

It appears SQLx does perform truncating casts in a way that could be problematic, for example: https://github.com/launchbadge/sqlx/blob/6f2905695b9606b5f51b40ce10af63ac9e696bb8/sqlx-postgres/src/arguments.rs#L163

This code has existed essentially since the beginning, so it is reasonable to assume that all published versions <= 0.8.0 are affected.

Mitigation

As always, you should make sure your application is validating untrustworthy user input. Reject any input over 4 GiB, or any input that could encode to a string longer than 4 GiB. Dynamically built queries are also potentially problematic if it pushes the message size over this 4 GiB bound.

Encode::size_hint() can be used for sanity checks, but do not assume that the size returned is accurate. For example, the Json<T> and Text<T> adapters have no reasonable way to predict or estimate the final encoded size, so they just return size_of::<T>() instead.

For web application backends, consider adding some middleware that limits the size of request bodies by default.

Resolution

sqlx 0.8.1 has been released with the fix: https://github.com/launchbadge/sqlx/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md#081---2024-08-23

Postgres users are advised to upgrade ASAP as a possible exploit has been demonstrated: https://github.com/launchbadge/sqlx/issues/3440#issuecomment-2307956901

MySQL and SQLite do not appear to be exploitable, but upgrading is recommended nonetheless.

The SharedPointer::alloc implementation for sync::Arc<T> and rc::Rc<T> in rkyv/src/impls/alloc/rc/atomic.rs (and rc.rs) does not check if the allocator returns a null pointer on OOM (Out of Memory).

This null pointer can flow through to SharedPointer::from_value, which calls Box::from_raw(ptr) with the null pointer. This triggers undefined behavior when utilizing safe deserialization APIs (such as rkyv::from_bytes or rkyv::deserialize_using) if an OOM condition occurs during the allocation of the shared pointer.

The issue is reachable through safe code and violates Rust's safety guarantees.

In the unique reclaim path of BytesMut::reserve, the condition

if v_capacity >= new_cap + offset

uses an unchecked addition. When new_cap + offset overflows usize in release builds, this condition may incorrectly pass, causing self.cap to be set to a value that exceeds the actual allocated capacity. Subsequent APIs such as spare_capacity_mut() then trust this corrupted cap value and may create out-of-bounds slices, leading to UB.

This behavior is observable in release builds (integer overflow wraps), whereas debug builds panic due to overflow checks.

PoC

use bytes::*;

fn main() {
    let mut a = BytesMut::from(&b"hello world"[..]);
    let mut b = a.split_off(5);

    // Ensure b becomes the unique owner of the backing storage
    drop(a);

    // Trigger overflow in new_cap + offset inside reserve
    b.reserve(usize::MAX - 6);

    // This call relies on the corrupted cap and may cause UB & HBO
    b.put_u8(b'h');
}

Workarounds

Users of BytesMut::reserve are only affected if integer overflow checks are configured to wrap. When integer overflow is configured to panic, this issue does not apply.

Diesel allows users to configure various options for PostgreSQL's COPY FROM and COPY TO statements. These configurations are partially provided as strings or characters.

Diesel did not check if any these user-provided options contain a quote character ', which can lead to the injection of additional options in the current COPY FROM/COPY TO statement.

This vulnerability affects any user of COPY FROM/COPY TO that passes user-provided input to any of the affected functions. It can result in modifications of options in the current statement, but it is not possible inject additional statements.

Mitigation

The preferred mitigation to the outlined problem is to update to Diesel version 2.3.8 or newer, which includes fixes for the problem.

Resolution

Diesel now correctly escapes any quotes contained in the provided arguments.

Diesel allows to register custom aggregate SQL functions for SQLite via the SqliteAggregate interface.

To store an instance of the custom aggregate processor Diesel relied on the sqlite3_aggregate_context function provided by sqlite. This function doesn't provide any guarantees about alignment of the returned allocation, which in turn can lead to problems if the type implementing requires a special alignment, e.g. via a custom #[align(x)] attribute on the type implementing this trait. This affects any user of SqliteAggregate that registers the custom aggregate function with an SQLite connection, while using a non-standard alignment on the type implementing this trait.

Mitigation

The preferred mitigation to the outlined problem is to update to a Diesel version 2.3.8 or newer, which includes fixes for the problem.

Resolution

Diesel now allocates the corresponding memory on Rust side to get a correctly aligned allocation.