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component manifest paths can escape the toolchain install prefix #4943
Description
manifest.in component paths appear to be trusted after decoding. ComponentPart::decode() converts the path string directly into a PathBuf, and transaction operations only guard with relpath.is_relative(). However, paths containing parent components like ../outside are still relative.
Those paths are later joined with the install prefix via InstallPrefix::abs_path(), so a component manifest entry such as:
file:../outside-file
can target a path outside the toolchain directory during install. Those paths are persisted into component manifests and can later be used during uninstall; rollback also uses the recorded transaction paths.
rustup/src/dist/component/components.rs
Line 221 in 4b1423b
rustup/src/dist/component/transaction.rs
Lines 181 to 183 in 4b1423b
Ideally, component manifest paths should be confined to the toolchain install prefix. Absolute paths, prefix paths, empty paths, and paths containing .. should be rejected as corrupt component manifests.
It may also be worth validating that the package source path stays under the extracted package root.
Ref:
- fix(component): normalize path separators #4179 normalized component path separators, but does not appear to reject parent-directory components or enforce prefix containment.
Activity
djc commentedon Jul 7, 2026
Not saying we shouldn't fix it, but pretty sure the rustup user is trusting the source of the manifest anyway, right? They could probably do worse things than install stuff outside of the prefix.
cachebag commentedon Jul 7, 2026
@djc yes, it is totally not high severity or critical. more of a cheap in-depth defense. however, the implication of this i presume is also that malformed component paths can make rustup itself write, remove, or roll back files outside the toolchain prefix before any installed binary is even run.
rami3l commentedon Jul 7, 2026
@cachebag Thanks for this issue.
AFAIK rustup is pretty much executing near-arbitrary manifest here and I'm not sure if there is an attack vector associated to it.
cachebag commentedon Jul 7, 2026
@rami3l
as aforementioned, rustup seems to intend component paths to stay within the toolchain prefix, but
..paths let rustup’s own install/uninstall/rollback operations escape that prefix, so this seems worth treating as a containment hardening/correctness?i agree that the severity from a threat-model standpoint is probably low since the manifest is trusted. but it still seems incorrect nonetheless.
rami3l commentedon Jul 9, 2026
@cachebag There is no need to close this though... I guess somewhere down the road this might turn out to be relevant, it's just that I don't think we should do something about it right now 🙏
Functionhx commentedon Jul 11, 2026
I can take this. I'll add path traversal hardening for component manifest paths.