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.

ring::aead::quic::HeaderProtectionKey::new_mask() may panic when overflow checking is enabled. In the QUIC protocol, an attacker can induce this panic by sending a specially-crafted packet. Even unintentionally it is likely to occur in 1 out of every 2**32 packets sent and/or received.

On 64-bit targets operations using ring::aead::{AES_128_GCM, AES_256_GCM} may panic when overflow checking is enabled, when encrypting/decrypting approximately 68,719,476,700 bytes (about 64 gigabytes) of data in a single chunk. Protocols like TLS and SSH are not affected by this because those protocols break large amounts of data into small chunks. Similarly, most applications will not attempt to encrypt/decrypt 64GB of data in one chunk.

Overflow checking is not enabled in release mode by default, but RUSTFLAGS="-C overflow-checks" or overflow-checks = true in the Cargo.toml profile can override this. Overflow checking is usually enabled by default in debug mode.