CVE-2023-45283

Published: 9 November 2023

The filepath package does not recognize paths with a \??\ prefix as special. On Windows, a path beginning with \??\ is a Root Local Device path equivalent to a path beginning with \\?\. Paths with a \??\ prefix may be used to access arbitrary locations on the system. For example, the path \??\c:\x is equivalent to the more common path c:\x. Before fix, Clean could convert a rooted path such as \a\..\??\b into the root local device path \??\b. Clean will now convert this to .\??\b. Similarly, Join(\, ??, b) could convert a seemingly innocent sequence of path elements into the root local device path \??\b. Join will now convert this to \.\??\b. In addition, with fix, IsAbs now correctly reports paths beginning with \??\ as absolute, and VolumeName correctly reports the \??\ prefix as a volume name. UPDATE: Go 1.20.11 and Go 1.21.4 inadvertently changed the definition of the volume name in Windows paths starting with \?, resulting in filepath.Clean(\?\c:) returning \?\c: rather than \?\c:\ (among other effects). The previous behavior has been restored.

Notes

Packages built using golang need to be rebuilt once the
vulnerability has been fixed. This CVE entry does not
list packages that need rebuilding outside of the main
repository or the Ubuntu variants with PPA overlays.

may impact only Windows paths, a better triage
of real impact, if any, is appreciated.
closed related to CVE-2023-45284

Status

Severity score breakdown

References

• https://groups.google.com/g/golang-announce/c/4tU8LZfBFkY
• https://github.com/golang/go/issues/63713
• https://github.com/golang/go/commit/9e933c189ca3a84f12995b3c799364a06abc4376 (go1.21.4)
• https://github.com/golang/go/commit/46fb78168596f7ce8834f528bb0eb9555c08bcae (go1.20.11)
• https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-45283
• NVD
• Launchpad
• Debian