GHSA-rfj2-q3h3-hm5j · Severity: low · Ecosystem: rust — Cargo extracting malicious crates can corrupt arbitrary files
Cargo is a package manager for the rust programming language. After a package is downloaded, Cargo extracts its source code in the ~/.cargo folder on disk, making it available to the Rust projects it builds. To record when an extraction is successful, Cargo writes "ok" to the .cargo-ok file at the root of the extracted source code once it extracted all the files. It was discovered that Cargo allowed packages to contain a .cargo-ok symbolic link, which Cargo would extract. Then, when Cargo attempted to write "ok" into .cargo-ok, it would actually replace the first two bytes of the file the symlink pointed to with ok. This would allow an attacker to corrupt one file on the machine using Cargo to extract the package. Note that by design Cargo allows code execution at build time, due to build scripts and procedural macros. The vulnerabilities in this advisory allow performing a subset of the possible damage in a harder to track down way. Your dependencies must still be trusted if you want to be protected from attacks, as it's possible to perform the same attacks with build scripts and procedural macros. The vulnerability is present in all versions of Cargo. Rust 1.64, to be released on September 22nd, will include a fix for it. Since the vulnerability is just a more limited way to accomplish what a malicious build scripts or procedural macros can do, we decided not to publish Rust point releases backporting the security fix. Patch files are available for Rust 1.63.0 are available in the wg-security-response repository for people building their own toolchain. Mitigations We recommend users of alternate registries to exercise care in which package they download, by only including trusted dependencies in their projects. Please note that even with these vulnerabilities fixed, by design Cargo allows arbitrary code execution at build time thanks to build scripts and procedural macros: a malicious dependency will be able to cause damage regardless of these vulnerabilities. crates.io implemented server-side checks to reject these kinds of packages years ago, and there are no packages on crates.io exploiting these vulnerabilities. crates.io users still need to exercise care in choosing their dependencies though, as remote code execution is allowed by design there as well.
Conclusion & alert: CVE-2022-36113 is rated Moderate Risk (55.7/100): CVSS Medium severity, with high exploitation likelihood (EPSS 8.94%, 92th percentile). Core evidence: EPSS ranks this CVE among the most likely to be exploited in the near term. EPSS rose +5.58% over the last day, indicating growing attacker interest. Mandatory action: High exploitation likelihood—assess exposure and prioritize remediation.
Risk is dynamic; we continuously reassess and refresh what is shown on this page as upstream context changes.
EPSS lead: Daily EPSS estimates relative likelihood of exploitation; percentile ranks this CVE among scored vulnerabilities (higher = more severe relative rank).
| # | Date | Old EPSS score | New EPSS score | Delta (New - Old) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2026-02-24 | 3.37% | 8.94% | +5.58% |
| 2 | 2026-02-23 | 3.89% | 3.37% | -0.53% |
| 3 | 2026-02-21 | — | 3.89% | — |
Full EPSS history (33 records total)
CVSS metrics for this CVE.
| Base score | Version | Severity | Vector | Exploitability | Impact | Score source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4.6 | 3.1 | MEDIUM |
|
1.2 | 3.4 | [email protected] |
| 8.1 | 3.1 | HIGH |
|
2.8 | 5.2 | [email protected] |
GHSA-rfj2-q3h3-hm5j · Severity: low · Ecosystem: rust — Cargo extracting malicious crates can corrupt arbitrary files
| vendor | priority | summary | link |
|---|---|---|---|
debian
|
not yet assigned | CVE-2022-36113 not yet assigned priority: Debian including 2 source packages (cargo, rust-cargo), 7 status rows across 5 suites (bookworm, bullseye, forky, sid, trixie): resolved 5, open 2. | https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2022-36113 |
gentoo
|
normal | CVE-2022-36113: 1 GLSA(s) (202210-09), 2 atom(s) (dev-lang/rust, dev-lang/rust-bin); latest impact normal. | https://bugs.gentoo.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=CVE-2022-36113 |
suse
|
medium | CVE-2022-36113 severity moderate: SUSE including 18 source package names (1.62:cargo1.62-1.62.1-150300.7.7.1, 1.62:rust1.62-1.62.1-150300.7.7.1, …), 139 product×package rows across 30 product lines (Container bci/rust, SUSE CaaS Platform 4.0, … (30 product lines)): Known Not Affected 117, Fixed 22. | https://www.suse.com/security/cve/CVE-2022-36113/ |
ubuntu
|
low | CVE-2022-36113 low priority: Ubuntu including 1 source packages (cargo), 13 status rows across 13 suites (bionic, focal, jammy, kinetic, lunar, mantic, noble, oracular, plucky, questing, trusty, upstream, xenial): DNE 5, released 3, ignored 2, needed 2, needs-triage 1. | https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2022-36113 |
| URL | Tags |
|---|---|
| https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/commit/97b80919e404b0768ea31ae329c3b4da54bed05a | Patch Third Party Advisory |
| https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/security/advisories/GHSA-rfj2-q3h3-hm5j | Mitigation Third Party Advisory |