MONAI (Medical Open Network for AI) is an AI toolkit for health care imaging. In versions up to and including 1.5.0, the pickle_operations function in monai/data/utils.py automatically handles dictionary key-value pairs ending with a specific suffix and deserializes them using pickle.loads() . This function also lacks any security measures. The deserialization may lead to code execution. As of time of publication, no known fixed versions are available.
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.