A pickle deserialization vulnerability exists in the Latex English error correction plug-in function of binary-husky/gpt_academic versions up to and including 3.83. This vulnerability allows attackers to achieve remote command execution by deserializing untrusted data. The issue arises from the inclusion of numpy in the deserialization whitelist, which can be exploited by constructing a malicious compressed package containing a merge_result.pkl file and a merge_proofread_en.tex file. The vulnerability is fixed in commit 91f5e6b.
The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid.
It is often convenient to serialize objects for communication or to save them for later use. However, deserialized data or code can often be modified without using the provided accessor functions if it does not use cryptography to protect itself. Furthermore, any cryptography would still be client-side security – which is a dangerous security assumption. Data that is untrusted can not be trusted to be well-formed. When developers place no restrictions on “gadget chains,” or series of instances and method invocations that can self-execute during the deserialization process (i.e., before the object is returned to the caller), it is sometimes possible for attackers to leverage them to perform unauthorized actions, like generating a shell.