EPyT-Flow is a Python package designed for the easy generation of hydraulic and water quality scenario data of water distribution networks. Prior to 0.16.1, EPyT-Flow’s REST API parses attacker-controlled JSON request bodies using a custom deserializer (my_load_from_json) that supports a type field. When type is present, the deserializer dynamically imports an attacker-specified module/class and instantiates it with attacker-supplied arguments. This allows invoking dangerous classes such as subprocess.Popen, which can lead to OS command execution during JSON parsing. This also affects the loading of JSON files. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.16.1.
Weakness
The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently ensuring that the resulting data will be valid.
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.