Impact

The affected functions set environment variables without synchronization. On Unix-like operating systems, this can crash in multithreaded programs. Programs may segfault due to dereferencing a dangling pointer if an environment variable is read in a different thread than the affected functions. This may occur without the user's knowledge, notably in the Rust standard library or third-party libraries.

The affected functions from time 0.2.7 through 0.2.22 are:

• time::UtcOffset::local_offset_at
• time::UtcOffset::try_local_offset_at
• time::UtcOffset::current_local_offset
• time::UtcOffset::try_current_local_offset
• time::OffsetDateTime::now_local
• time::OffsetDateTime::try_now_local

The affected functions in time 0.1 (all versions) are:

• time::at_utc
• time::at
• time::now
• time::tzset

Non-Unix targets (including Windows and wasm) are unaffected.

Patches

Pending a proper fix, the internal method that determines the local offset has been modified to always return None on the affected operating systems. This has the effect of returning an Err on the try_* methods and UTC on the non-try_* methods.

Users and library authors with time in their dependency tree should perform cargo update, which will pull in the updated, unaffected code.

Users of time 0.1 do not have a patch and should upgrade to an unaffected version: time 0.2.23 or greater or the 0.3 series.

Workarounds

A possible workaround for crates affected through the transitive dependency in chrono, is to avoid using the default oldtime feature dependency of the chrono crate by disabling its default-features and manually specifying the required features instead.

Examples:

Cargo.toml:

chrono = { version = "0.4", default-features = false, features = ["serde"] }

chrono = { version = "0.4.22", default-features = false, features = ["clock"] }

Commandline:

cargo add chrono --no-default-features -F clock

Sources:

• chronotope/chrono#602 (comment)
• vityafx/serde-aux#21

idna 0.5.0 and earlier accepts Punycode labels that do not produce any non-ASCII output, which means that either ASCII labels or the empty root label can be masked such that they appear unequal without IDNA processing or when processed with a different implementation and equal when processed with idna 0.5.0 or earlier.

Concretely, example.org and xn--example-.org become equal after processing by idna 0.5.0 or earlier. Also, example.org.xn-- and example.org. become equal after processing by idna 0.5.0 or earlier.

In applications using idna (but not in idna itself) this may be able to lead to privilege escalation when host name comparison is part of a privilege check and the behavior is combined with a client that resolves domains with such labels instead of treating them as errors that preclude DNS resolution / URL fetching and with the attacker managing to introduce a DNS entry (and TLS certificate) for an xn---masked name that turns into the name of the target when processed by idna 0.5.0 or earlier.

Remedy

Upgrade to idna 1.0.3 or later, if depending on idna directly, or to url 2.5.4 or later, if depending on idna via url. (This issue was fixed in idna 1.0.0, but versions earlier than 1.0.3 are not recommended for other reasons.)

When upgrading, please take a moment to read about alternative Unicode back ends for idna.

If you are using Rust earlier than 1.81 in combination with SQLx 0.8.2 or earlier, please also read an issue about combining them with url 2.5.4 and idna 1.0.3.

Additional information

This issue resulted from idna 0.5.0 and earlier implementing the UTS 46 specification literally on this point and the specification having this bug. The specification bug has been fixed in revision 33 of UTS 46.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to kageshiron for recognizing the security implications of this behavior.