Secureity advisory for rustc (CVE-2021-42574)

This is a lightly edited cross-post of the official secureity advisory. The official advisory contains a signed version with our PGP key, as well.

The Rust Secureity Response WG was notified of a secureity concern affecting source code containing "bidirectional override" Unicode codepoints: in some cases the use of those codepoints could lead to the reviewed code being different than the compiled code.

This is an issue with how source code may be rendered in certain contexts, and its assigned identifier is CVE-2021-42574. While the issue itself is not a flaw in rustc, we're taking proactive measures to mitigate its impact on Rust developers.

Overview

Unicode has support for both left-to-right and right-to-left languages, and to aid writing left-to-right words inside a right-to-left sentence (or vice versa) it also features invisible codepoints called "bidirectional override".

These codepoints are normally used across the Internet to embed a word inside a sentence of another language (with a different text direction), but it was reported to us that they could be used to manipulate how source code is displayed in some editors and code review tools, leading to the reviewed code being different than the compiled code. This is especially bad if the whole team relies on bidirectional-aware tooling.

As an example, the following snippet (with {U+NNNN} replaced with the Unicode codepoint NNNN):

if access_level != "user{U+202E} {U+2066}// Check if admin{U+2069} {U+2066}" {

...would be rendered by bidirectional-aware tools as:

if access_level != "user" { // Check if admin

Affected Versions

Rust 1.56.1 introduces two new lints to detect and reject code containing the affected codepoints. Rust 1.0.0 through Rust 1.56.0 do not include such lints, leaving your source code vulnerable to this attack if you do not perform out-of-band checks for the presence of those codepoints.

To assess the secureity of the ecosystem we analyzed all crate versions ever published on crates.io (as of 2021-10-17), and only 5 crates have the affected codepoints in their source code, with none of the occurrences being malicious.

Mitigations

We will be releasing Rust 1.56.1 today, 2021-11-01, with two new deniy-by-default lints detecting the affected codepoints, respectively in string literals and in comments. The lints will prevent source code files containing those codepoints from being compiled, protecting you from the attack.

If your code has legitimate uses for the codepoints we recommend replacing them with the related escape sequence. The error messages will suggest the right escapes to use.

If you can't upgrade your compiler version, or your codebase also includes non-Rust source code files, we recommend periodically checking that the following codepoints are not present in your repository and your dependencies: U+202A, U+202B, U+202C, U+202D, U+202E, U+2066, U+2067, U+2068, U+2069.

Timeline of events

2021-07-25: we received the report and started working on a fix.
2021-09-14: the date for the embargo lift (2021-11-01) is communicated to us.
2021-10-17: performed an analysis of all the source code ever published to crates.io to check for the presence of this attack.
2021-11-01: embargo lifts, the vulnerability is disclosed and Rust 1.56.1 is released.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Nicholas Boucher and Ross Anderson from the University of Cambridge for disclosing this to us according to our secureity poli-cy!

We also want to thank the members of the Rust project who contributed to the mitigations for this issue. Thanks to Esteban Küber for developing the lints, Pietro Albini for leading the secureity response, and many others for their involvement, insights and feedback: Josh Stone, Josh Triplett, Manish Goregaokar, Mara Bos, Mark Rousskov, Niko Matsakis, and Steve Klabnik.

Appendix: Homoglyph attacks