Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Introduced protections against system command injection #5

Conversation

pixeebot[bot]
Copy link

@pixeebot pixeebot bot commented Feb 27, 2024

This change hardens all instances of Runtime#exec() to offer protection against attack.

Left unchecked, Runtime#exec() can execute any arbitrary system command. If an attacker can control part of the strings used to as program paths or arguments, they could execute arbitrary programs, install malware, and anything else they could do if they had a shell open on the application host.

Our change introduces a sandbox which protects the application:

+ import io.github.pixee.security.SystemCommand;
  ...
- Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command);
+ Process p = SystemCommand.runCommand(Runtime.getRuntime(), command);

The default restrictions applied are the following:

  • Prevent command chaining. Many exploits work by injecting command separators and causing the shell to interpret a second, malicious command. The SystemCommand#runCommand() attempts to parse the given command, and throw a SecurityException if multiple commands are present.
  • Prevent arguments targeting sensitive files. There is little reason for custom code to target sensitive system files like /etc/passwd, so the sandbox prevents arguments that point to these files that may be targets for exfiltration.

There are more options for sandboxing if you are interested in locking down system commands even more.

More reading

I have additional improvements ready for this repo! If you want to see them, leave the comment:

@pixeebot next

... and I will open a new PR right away!

Powered by: pixeebot (codemod ID: pixee:java/harden-process-creation)

<dependency>
<groupId>io.github.pixee</groupId>
<artifactId>java-security-toolkit</artifactId>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
Copy link
Author

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

This library holds security tools for protecting Java API calls.

License: MIT ✅ | Open source ✅ | More facts

Copy link
Author

pixeebot bot commented Mar 12, 2024

I'm confident in this change, but I'm not a maintainer of this project. Do you see any reason not to merge it?

If this change was not helpful, or you have suggestions for improvements, please let me know!

Copy link
Author

pixeebot bot commented Mar 12, 2024

Just a friendly ping to remind you about this change. If there are concerns about it, we'd love to hear about them!

Copy link
Author

pixeebot bot commented Mar 19, 2024

This change may not be a priority right now, so I'll close it. If there was something I could have done better, please let me know!

You can also customize me to make sure I'm working with you in the way you want.

@pixeebot pixeebot bot closed this Mar 19, 2024
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

0 participants