The following presentation at this year's DEF CON was brought to our attention on the Diesel Gitter Channel:

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 Diesel does perform truncating casts in a way that could be problematic, for example: https://github.com/diesel-rs/diesel/blob/ae82c4a5a133db65612b7436356f549bfecda1c7/diesel/src/pg/connection/stmt/mod.rs#L36

This code has existed essentially since the beginning, so it is reasonable to assume that all published versions <= 2.2.2 are affected.

Mitigation

The prefered migration to the outlined problem is to update to a Diesel version newer than 2.2.2, which includes fixes for the problem.

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.

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

Resolution

Diesel now uses #[deny] directives for the following Clippy lints:

• cast_possible_truncation
• cast_possible_wrap
• cast_sign_loss

to prevent casts that will lead to precision loss or other trunctations. Additionally we performed an audit of the relevant code.

A fix is included in the 2.2.3 release.

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.