That’s entirely dependent on the application. In many cases the command would be hard-coded in the application, in which case you’re right. But some applications have good reasons to pass user-supplied arguments to scripts. Imagine a case where an application generates PDFs through a batch script, for instance. It might make sense to let users specify the filename, but then it does need proper escaping. In such a case it’s a huge risk if it turns out the escaping rules suddenly changed because Windows silently invoked cmd.exe under the hood.
even in your hypothetical of a file name passed in through the args, either the attacker has enough access to run said tool with whatever args they want, or, they have taken over that process and can inject whatever args they want.
either attack vector requires a prior breach of the system. you’re owned either way.
the only way this actually works as an exploit is if there are poorly written services out there that blindly call through to CreateProcess that take in user sourced input without any sanitization, which if you’re doing that then no duh you’re gonna have a bad time.
cmd.exe is always going to be invoked if you’re executing a batch script, it’s literally the interpreter for .bat files. the issue is, as usual, code that might be blindly taking user input and not even bothering to sanitize it before using it.
take in user sourced input without any sanitization
But that’s exactly the problem: these applications were sanitizing the input using the APIs provided by their language standard libraries. Except that sanitization proved insufficient because the requirements for sanitization differ greatly when the command is interpreted by cmd.exe as opposed to running regular executables. This is such a big footgun in the Windows API that it was overlooked by seemingly every major programming language implementation out there.
That’s entirely dependent on the application. In many cases the command would be hard-coded in the application, in which case you’re right. But some applications have good reasons to pass user-supplied arguments to scripts. Imagine a case where an application generates PDFs through a batch script, for instance. It might make sense to let users specify the filename, but then it does need proper escaping. In such a case it’s a huge risk if it turns out the escaping rules suddenly changed because Windows silently invoked
cmd.exeunder the hood.even in your hypothetical of a file name passed in through the args, either the attacker has enough access to run said tool with whatever args they want, or, they have taken over that process and can inject whatever args they want.
either attack vector requires a prior breach of the system. you’re owned either way.
the only way this actually works as an exploit is if there are poorly written services out there that blindly call through to
CreateProcessthat take in user sourced input without any sanitization, which if you’re doing that then no duh you’re gonna have a bad time.cmd.exeis always going to be invoked if you’re executing a batch script, it’s literally the interpreter for .bat files. the issue is, as usual, code that might be blindly taking user input and not even bothering to sanitize it before using it.But that’s exactly the problem: these applications were sanitizing the input using the APIs provided by their language standard libraries. Except that sanitization proved insufficient because the requirements for sanitization differ greatly when the command is interpreted by
cmd.exeas opposed to running regular executables. This is such a big footgun in the Windows API that it was overlooked by seemingly every major programming language implementation out there.