GHSA-rrjw-j4m2-mf34 — medium GitHub Advisory (CVE-2023-53158) in rust/gix-transport

Description

The gix-transport crate prior to the patched version 0.36.1 would allow attackers to use malicious ssh clone URLs to pass arbitrary arguments to the ssh program, leading to arbitrary code execution.

PoC: gix clone 'ssh://-oProxyCommand=open$IFS-aCalculator/foo'

This will launch a calculator on OSX.

See https://secure.phabricator.com/T12961 for more details on similar vulnerabilities in git.

Thanks for vin01 for disclosing this issue.

Basic information

Type: reviewed
Severity: medium
Advisory on GitHub: Open advisory ↗
Repository advisory: —
Source code: Browse source ↗
Published (advisory): 2023-09-25 20:21:16 UTC
Updated: 2025-07-28 15:37:25 UTC
GitHub reviewed: 2023-09-25 20:21:16 UTC

Score	Percentile
0.02%	6.44%

CVSS Scores

Base score	Version	Severity	Vector
4.1	3.1	—	`CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N` Click to expand Attack vector (AV:L) They already need access on the box, or another person has to do something wrong; it’s not a remote drive-by. Attack complexity (AC:H) Even with access, the exploit needs extra luck, timing, or a fussy environment to actually work. Privileges required (PR:N) No account or special rights needed—anonymous or random user is enough. User interaction (UI:R) A real person has to do something—click, install, enable—otherwise it doesn’t land. Scope (S:C) Breaking this can reach past the original component and bite other resources—bigger blast radius. Confidentiality (C:L) Some sensitive info could get out, but not a total data dump. Integrity (I:L) Attackers could change some data, but it’s limited—not everything goes. Availability (A:N) Service keeps running; no real outage angle.

Identifiers

Type	Value
GHSA	GHSA-rrjw-j4m2-mf34 ↗
CVE	CVE-2023-53158 ↗

CWEs

CWE id	Name
CWE-78	Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection')
CWE-88	Improper Neutralization of Argument Delimiters in a Command ('Argument Injection')

Credits

EliahKagan (analyst)

Affected packages (1)

Vulnerable version ranges and first patched releases as published by GitHub.

Ecosystem	Package	Vulnerable range	First patched	Vulnerable functions
rust	gix-transport	< 0.36.1	0.36.1	—

gix-transport code execution vulnerability