Launch Week Day 1: Announcing Security Design Review
HIGH 8.8 npm

Remote Code Execution in electron

GHSA-w222-53c6-c86p · CVE-2018-1000006

Published · Modified

Description

Affected versions of electron may be susceptible to a remote code execution flaw when certain conditions are met:

  1. The electron application is running on Windows.
  2. The electron application registers as the default handler for a protocol, such as nodeapp://.

This vulnerability is caused by a failure to sanitize additional arguments to chromium in the command line handler for Electron.

MacOS and Linux are not vulnerable.

Recommendation

Update electron to a version that is not vulnerable. If updating is not possible, the electron team has provided the following guidance:

If for some reason you are unable to upgrade your Electron version, you can append -- as the last argument when calling app.setAsDefaultProtocolClient, which prevents Chromium from parsing further options. The double dash -- signifies the end of command options, after which only positional parameters are accepted.

app.setAsDefaultProtocolClient(protocol, process.execPath, [
  '--your-switches-here',
  '--'
])

Ready to move

Start Securing

Free, no credit card | First findings in minutes