VSCode Vulnerabilities – Thomas Chauchefoin, Paul Gerste – PSW #804

Sonar Vulnerability Researchers Thomas Chauchefoin and Paul Gerste conducted research on the security of Visual Studio Code — the most popular code editor out there — which was presented at DEF CON 31 in August. The pair uncovered a few ways for attackers to gain code execution on a victim's computer if they clicked on a specially crafted link or opened a malicious folder in Visual Studio Code, bypassing existing mitigations like Workspace Trust. Developers tend to trust their IDEs and do not expect such security issues to exist. As developers have access to source code and production systems, they make for very interesting targets for threat actors. Important to note is that the security concepts that the two are able to demonstrate apply not just to Visual Studio Code, but to most other code editors. This is also the story of how the researchers got an unexpected $30,000 bounty from Microsoft for these bugs, by mistake!

Segment Resources:

BLOG POSTS Securing Developer Tools: Argument Injection in Visual Studio Code (https://www.sonarsource.com/blog/securing-developer-tools-argument-injection-in-vscode/) Securing Developer Tools: Git Integrations (https://www.sonarsource.com/blog/securing-developer-tools-git-integrations/)

CVEs CVE-2023-36742 (https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2023-36742) CVE-2022-30129 (https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/en-US/advisory/CVE-2022-30129) CVE-2021-43891 (https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/en-US/advisory/CVE-2021-43891)