GHSA-9837-48hr-q32j: Glances has Insecure Pickle Deserialization in its Version Cache that Leads to Arbitrary Code Execution

Summary glances/outdated.py uses pickle.load() to read a version-check cache file stored at a predictable, world-accessible path (~/.cache/glances/glances-version.db or $XDG_CACHE_HOME/glances/glances-version.db). No integrity check, signature verification, or format validation is performed before deserialization. An attacker with write access to that path — through any of several realistic local or container-level scenarios — can plant a malicious pickle file and achieve arbitrary code execution as the OS user running Glances the next time it starts with version checking enabled (the default). Details Affected file: glances/outdated.py, method Outdated._load_cache(), line 121 Direct URL (commit 04579778e733d705898a169e049dc84772c852da): - https://github.com/nicolargo/glances/blob/04579778e733d705898a169e049dc84772c852da/glances/outdated.py#L121 outdated.py (_load_cache, line 119-127) try: with open(self.cache_file, 'rb') as f: cached_data = pickle.load(f) # ← no integrity check except Exception as e: logger.debug(f"Cannot read version from cache file: {self.cache_file} ({e})") ... self.cache_file is constructed from the XDG cache directory path at Outdated.init(): outdated.py (init) self.cache_file = os.path.join( user_cache_dir('glances')[0], 'glances-version.db' ) On a default Linux installation this resolves to /home/john/.cache/glances/glances-version.db (or /root/.cache/glances/… when Glances runs as root). Python's pickle module is an execution-capable serialisation format: any class that implements reduce can embed an arbitrary callable and argument tuple that Python will invoke unconditionally at pickle.load() time. There is no safe subset of pickle; the only safe mitigation is to not use it for untrusted data. The code was verified on x86_64 Linux, Python 3.13, Glances 4.5.5_dev1 (commit 04579778e733d705898a169e049dc84772c852da). A malicious pickle crafted with os.system() via reduce executed the injected shell command successfully before the sur