Vulnerabilities

pip would incorrectly handle doubly-encoded package URLs from indexes allowing for files to be installed to arbitrary locations on disk even when installing wheels. This vulnerability requires downloading or installing a package from a malicious package index to succeed, malicious packages alone are not able to exploit this vulnerability. Note that this vulnerability only materially impacts users running `pip download` with the `--only-binary` option as installing source distributions from an untrusted index is already an unsafe operation that executes code during install time.

pip would treat console_scripts and gui_scripts as paths instead of file names without sanitizing the resolved absolute path to the installation directory, leading to entry points being installed outside the installation directory.

When installing a package from a Mercurial VCS URL (ie "pip install hg+...") with pip prior to v23.3, the specified Mercurial revision could be used to inject arbitrary configuration options to the "hg clone" call (ie "--config"). Controlling the Mercurial configuration can modify how and which repository is installed. This vulnerability does not affect users who aren't installing from Mercurial.

pipenv is a Python development workflow tool. Starting with version 2018.10.9 and prior to version 2022.1.8, a flaw in pipenv's parsing of requirements files allows an attacker to insert a specially crafted string inside a comment anywhere within a requirements.txt file, which will cause victims who use pipenv to install the requirements file to download dependencies from a package index server controlled by the attacker. By embedding malicious code in packages served from their malicious index server, the attacker can trigger arbitrary remote code execution (RCE) on the victims' systems. If an attacker is able to hide a malicious `--index-url` option in a requirements file that a victim installs with pipenv, the attacker can embed arbitrary malicious code in packages served from their malicious index server that will be executed on the victim's host during installation (remote code execution/RCE). When pip installs from a source distribution, any code in the setup.py is executed by the install process. This issue is patched in version 2022.1.8. The GitHub Security Advisory contains more information about this vulnerability.

A flaw was found in python-pip in the way it handled Unicode separators in git references. A remote attacker could possibly use this issue to install a different revision on a repository. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data integrity. This is fixed in python-pip version 21.1.

The pip package before 19.2 for Python allows Directory Traversal when a URL is given in an install command, because a Content-Disposition header can have ../ in a filename, as demonstrated by overwriting the /root/.ssh/authorized_keys file. This occurs in _download_http_url in _internal/download.py.

An issue was discovered in pip (all versions) because it installs the version with the highest version number, even if the user had intended to obtain a private package from a private index. This only affects use of the --extra-index-url option, and exploitation requires that the package does not already exist in the public index (and thus the attacker can put the package there with an arbitrary version number). NOTE: it has been reported that this is intended functionality and the user is responsible for using --extra-index-url securely