Affected versions of this crate did not properly detect invalid requests that could allow HTTP/1 request smuggling (HRS) attacks when running alongside a vulnerable front-end proxy server. This can result in leaked internal and/or user data, including credentials, when the front-end proxy is also vulnerable.

Popular front-end proxies and load balancers already mitigate HRS attacks so it is recommended that they are also kept up to date; check your specific set up. You should upgrade even if the front-end proxy receives exclusively HTTP/2 traffic and connects to the back-end using HTTP/1; several downgrade attacks are known that can also expose HRS vulnerabilities.

The Rust Security Response WG was notified that the regex crate did not properly limit the complexity of the regular expressions (regex) it parses. An attacker could use this security issue to perform a denial of service, by sending a specially crafted regex to a service accepting untrusted regexes. No known vulnerability is present when parsing untrusted input with trusted regexes.

This issue has been assigned CVE-2022-24713. The severity of this vulnerability is "high" when the regex crate is used to parse untrusted regexes. Other uses of the regex crate are not affected by this vulnerability.

Overview

The regex crate features built-in mitigations to prevent denial of service attacks caused by untrusted regexes, or untrusted input matched by trusted regexes. Those (tunable) mitigations already provide sane defaults to prevent attacks. This guarantee is documented and it's considered part of the crate's API.

Unfortunately a bug was discovered in the mitigations designed to prevent untrusted regexes to take an arbitrary amount of time during parsing, and it's possible to craft regexes that bypass such mitigations. This makes it possible to perform denial of service attacks by sending specially crafted regexes to services accepting user-controlled, untrusted regexes.

Affected versions

All versions of the regex crate before or equal to 1.5.4 are affected by this issue. The fix is include starting from regex 1.5.5.

Mitigations

We recommend everyone accepting user-controlled regexes to upgrade immediately to the latest version of the regex crate.

Unfortunately there is no fixed set of problematic regexes, as there are practically infinite regexes that could be crafted to exploit this vulnerability. Because of this, we do not recommend denying known problematic regexes.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Addison Crump for responsibly disclosing this to us according to the Rust security policy, and for helping review the fix.

We also want to thank Andrew Gallant for developing the fix, and Pietro Albini for coordinating the disclosure and writing this advisory.

A malicious or compromised server can send a row containing fewer fields than its row description declares columns. Reading one of the missing columns then panics with an out-of-bounds index, aborting the calling task. This affects even the otherwise non-panicking try_get, and both Row and SimpleQueryRow.

Applications that connect only to a trusted database are not exposed; the risk applies to clients that may connect to untrusted or user-supplied servers, or whose connection can be intercepted by a man-in-the-middle.

The following SVG will produce a link with a javascript scheme. If the user clicks this link, they will run it.

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <a>
    <set attributeName="href" to="javascript:alert('SET_XSS')"></set>
    <text y="30">Click set</text>
  </a>
</svg>

Ammonia did not apply attribute filters based on attributeName, so the contents of the to, from, and values tags were not sanitized as URLs.

Applications that do not explicitly allow either of these tags should not be affected, since neither are allowed by default.

Discovered by: Younghun Ko (@koyokr)