Cargo incorrectly handled symlinks inside of crate tarballs downloaded from third-party registries, allowing a malicious crate to override the source code of another crate from the same registry. The severity of the vulnerability is medium for users of third-party registries. Users of crates.io are not affected, as crates.io forbids uploading crates containing any symlink.

Cargo between 1.68 and 1.96 incorrectly normalized the URLs of third-party registries using the sparse index protocol. If a hosting provider allowed multiple registries to be hosted with arbitrary names within the same domain, an attacker able to publish crates in a registry could obtain the credentials of others users of the same registry. The severity of the vulnerability is low, due to the extremely niche requirements needed to achieve the attack.