Go toolchain vulnerabilities

Previously, a user operating inside of a malicious Go project that defines a bogus golang.org/toolchain go.sum entry and operates a malicious GOMODPROXY the user chooses to use can bypass the intended checksum. We now ensure that golang.org/toolchain always goes to the network for the canonical checksum.

Previously, a user operating inside of a malicious Go project that defines a bogus golang.org/fips140 and operates a malicious GOMODPROXY the user chooses to connect to can serve an arbitrary module in its place. We now unpack the trusted ziphash for the bundled golang.org/fips140 module and construct its entry in the GOMODCACHE such that it can be verified by the toolchain.

A malicious module proxy can exploit a flaw in the go command's validation of module checksums to bypass checksum database validation. This vulnerability affects any user using an untrusted module proxy (GOMODPROXY) or checksum database (GOSUMDB). A malicious module proxy can serve altered versions of the Go toolchain. When selecting a different version of the Go toolchain than the currently installed toolchain (due to the GOTOOLCHAIN environment variable, or a go.work or go.mod with a toolchain line), the go command will download and execute a toolchain provided by the module proxy. A malicious module proxy can bypass checksum database validation for this downloaded toolchain. Since this vulnerability affects the security of toolchain downloads, setting GOTOOLCHAIN to a fixed version is not sufficient. You must upgrade your base Go toolchain. The go tool always validates the hash of a toolchain before executing it, so fixed versions will refuse to execute any cached, altered versions of the toolchain. The go tool trusts go.sum files to contain accurate hashes of the current module's dependencies. A malicious proxy exploiting this vulnerability to serve an altered module will have caused an incorrect hash to be recorded in the go.sum. Users who have configured a non-trusted GOPROXY can determine if they have been affected by running "rm go.sum ; go mod tidy ; go mod verify", which will revalidate all dependencies of the current module. The specific flaw in more detail: The go command consults the checksum database to validate downloaded modules, when a module is not listed in the go.sum file. It verifies that the module hash reported by the checksum database matches the hash of the downloaded module. If, however, the checksum database returns a successful response that contains no entry for the module, the go command incorrectly permitted validation to succeed. A module proxy may mirror or proxy the checksum database, in which case the go command will not connect to the checksum database directly. Checksums reported by the checksum database are cryptographically signed, so a malicious proxy cannot alter the reported checksum for a module. However, a proxy which returns an empty checksum response, or a checksum response for an unrelated module, could cause the go command to proceed as if a downloaded module has been validated.

The compiler is meant to unwrap pointers which are the operands of a memory move; a no-op interface conversion prevented the compiler from making the correct determination about non-overlapping moves, potentially leading to memory corruption at runtime.

SWIG file names containing 'cgo' and well-crafted payloads could lead to code smuggling and arbitrary code execution at build time due to trust layer bypass.

A discrepancy between how Go and C/C++ comments were parsed allowed for code smuggling into the resulting cgo binary.

Downloading and building modules with malicious version strings can cause local code execution. On systems with Mercurial (hg) installed, downloading modules from non-standard sources (e.g., custom domains) can cause unexpected code execution due to how external VCS commands are constructed. This issue can also be triggered by providing a malicious version string to the toolchain. On systems with Git installed, downloading and building modules with malicious version strings can allow an attacker to write to arbitrary files on the filesystem. This can only be triggered by explicitly providing the malicious version strings to the toolchain and does not affect usage of @latest or bare module paths.

Building a malicious file with cmd/go can cause can cause a write to an attacker-controlled file with partial control of the file content. The "#cgo pkg-config:" directive in a Go source file provides command-line arguments to provide to the Go pkg-config command. An attacker can provide a "--log-file" argument to this directive, causing pkg-config to write to an attacker-controlled location.