GHSA-2hvr-h6gw-qrxp is a medium-severity (CVSS 4.2) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in cargo. O3 Security confirms whether GHSA-2hvr-h6gw-qrxp is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
Cargo extracting malicious crates can fill the file system
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for GHSA-2hvr-h6gw-qrxp.
Real-World Exposure
cargo🦀cargoReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects crates.io packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
The Rust Security Response WG was notified that Cargo did not prevent extracting some malformed packages downloaded from alternate registries. An attacker able to upload packages to an alternate registry could fill the file system when Cargo downloaded the package.
The severity of this vulnerability is "low" for users of alternate registries. Users relying on crates.io are not affected.
Note that by design Cargo allows code execution at build time, due to build scripts and procedural macros. The vulnerabilities in this advisory allow performing a subset of the possible damage in a harder to track down way. Your dependencies must still be trusted if you want to be protected from attacks, as it's possible to perform the same attacks with build scripts and procedural macros.
Disk space exaustion
It was discovered that Cargo did not limit the amount of data extracted from compressed archives. An attacker could upload to an alternate registry a specially crafted package that extracts way more data than its size (also known as a "zip bomb"), exhausting the disk space on the machine using Cargo to download the package.
Affected versions
The vulnerability is present in all versions of Cargo. Rust 1.64, to be released on September 22nd, will include a fix for it.
Since the vulnerability is just a more limited way to accomplish what a malicious build scripts or procedural macros can do, we decided not to publish Rust point releases backporting the security fix. Patch files are available for Rust 1.63.0 are available in the wg-security-response repository for people building their own toolchain.
Mitigations
We recommend users of alternate registries to excercise care in which package they download, by only including trusted dependencies in their projects. Please note that even with these vulnerabilities fixed, by design Cargo allows arbitrary code execution at build time thanks to build scripts and procedural macros: a malicious dependency will be able to cause damage regardless of these vulnerabilities.
crates.io implemented server-side checks to reject these kinds of packages years ago, and there are no packages on crates.io exploiting these vulnerabilities. crates.io users still need to excercise care in choosing their dependencies though, as the same concerns about build scripts and procedural macros apply here.
Acknowledgements
We want to thank Ori Hollander from JFrog Security Research for responsibly disclosing this to us according to the Rust security policy.
We also want to thank Josh Triplett for developing the fixes, Weihang Lo for developing the tests, and Pietro Albini for writing this advisory. The disclosure was coordinated by Pietro Albini and Josh Stone.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🦀crates.io | cargo | all versions | 0.65.0 |
| 🦀crates.io | cargo | ≥ 0.66.0&&< 0.67.0 | 0.67.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for cargo. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Fix
Update cargo to 0.65.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-2hvr-h6gw-qrxp is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 pinpoints whether GHSA-2hvr-h6gw-qrxp is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to GHSA-2hvr-h6gw-qrxp. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-2hvr-h6gw-qrxp in your dependencies?
O3 detects GHSA-2hvr-h6gw-qrxp across crates.io dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.