New submission from Alexey Izbyshev <[email protected]>:
In PC/getpathp.c CPython uses buffers with length MAXPATHLEN+1, which is 257 on
Windows[1]. On Windows 7, where PathCch* functions are not available, CPython
<= 3.8 fallbacks to PathCombineW()/PathCanonicalizeW()[2]. Those functions
assume that the destination buffer has room for MAX_PATH (260) characters. This
creates a dangerous setup: for example, gotlandmark()[3] can overflow the
destination if `filename` is long enough, and `filename` can be user-controlled.
I couldn't devise a simple way to trigger a buffer overflow in a default Python
installation, though it is possible if one, for example, makes sure that the
landmark file ("lib\os.py") can't be found in the default locations and then
supplies their own, long enough paths via e.g. PYTHONPATH environment variable
which eventually end up in gotlandmark(). Even when such buffer overflow is
triggered on my machine, I couldn't notice any change in behavior, probably
because 3 bytes is small enough to not overwrite anything important.
However, I'm not comfortable with this. Could we just raise MAXPATHLEN from 256
to 260 on Windows to avoid such kind of issues for sure?
Please also note that while the issue described above affects only Python <=
3.8 on Windows 7, I think it would make sense to increase MAXPATHLEN in newer
versions too to avoid any similar situations in the future (i.e. if two pieces
of code interact and one of them uses MAX_PATH while another uses MAXPATHLEN).
[1]
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/0389426fa4af4dfc8b1d7f3f291932d928392d8b/Include/osdefs.h#L13
[2]
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/0389426fa4af4dfc8b1d7f3f291932d928392d8b/PC/getpathp.c#L278
[3]
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/0389426fa4af4dfc8b1d7f3f291932d928392d8b/PC/getpathp.c#L333
----------
components: Windows
messages: 397655
nosy: izbyshev, paul.moore, steve.dower, tim.golden, zach.ware
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Dangerous mismatch between MAXPATHLEN and MAX_PATH on Windows
type: security
versions: Python 3.6, Python 3.7, Python 3.8
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Python tracker <[email protected]>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue44656>
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