The MongoDB Shell may be susceptible to control character injection where an attacker with control of the user’s clipboard could manipulate them to paste text into mongosh that evaluates arbitrary code. Control characters in the pasted text can be used to obfuscate malicious code. This issue affects mongosh versions prior to 2.3.9
Weakness
The product receives input from an upstream component, but it does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes special elements that could be interpreted as escape, meta, or control character sequences when they are sent to a downstream component.
Potential Mitigations
- Assume all input is malicious. Use an “accept known good” input validation strategy, i.e., use a list of acceptable inputs that strictly conform to specifications. Reject any input that does not strictly conform to specifications, or transform it into something that does.
- When performing input validation, consider all potentially relevant properties, including length, type of input, the full range of acceptable values, missing or extra inputs, syntax, consistency across related fields, and conformance to business rules. As an example of business rule logic, “boat” may be syntactically valid because it only contains alphanumeric characters, but it is not valid if the input is only expected to contain colors such as “red” or “blue.”
- Do not rely exclusively on looking for malicious or malformed inputs. This is likely to miss at least one undesirable input, especially if the code’s environment changes. This can give attackers enough room to bypass the intended validation. However, denylists can be useful for detecting potential attacks or determining which inputs are so malformed that they should be rejected outright.
References