CVE-2023-23930

vantage6 is privacy preserving federated learning infrastructure. Versions prior to 4.0.0 use pickle, which has known security issue, as a default serialization module but that has known security issues. All users of vantage6 that post tasks with the default serialization are affected. Version 4.0.0 contains a patch. Users may specify JSON serialization as a workaround.

Weakness

The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently ensuring that the resulting data will be valid.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Make fields transient to protect them from deserialization.
• An attempt to serialize and then deserialize a class containing transient fields will result in NULLs where the transient data should be. This is an excellent way to prevent time, environment-based, or sensitive variables from being carried over and used improperly.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/586.html

References

• https://github.com/vantage6/vantage6/blob/0682c4288f43fee5bcc72dc448cdd99bd7e57f76/docs/release_notes.rst#400
• https://github.com/vantage6/vantage6/commit/e62f03bacf2247bd59eed217e2e7338c3a01a5f0
• https://github.com/vantage6/vantage6/security/advisories/GHSA-5m22-cfq9-86x6
• https://medium.com/ochrona/python-pickle-is-notoriously-insecure-d6651f1974c9
• https://github.com/vantage6/vantage6/blob/0682c4288f43fee5bcc72dc448cdd99bd7e57f76/docs/release_notes.rst#400
• https://github.com/vantage6/vantage6/commit/e62f03bacf2247bd59eed217e2e7338c3a01a5f0
• https://github.com/vantage6/vantage6/security/advisories/GHSA-5m22-cfq9-86x6
• https://medium.com/ochrona/python-pickle-is-notoriously-insecure-d6651f1974c9