The article linked in the submission is more verbose but less clear and half of it is an advertisement for their product.
cyberpunk 1 hours ago [-]
> As a side note, we also discovered a local vulnerability (a race
condition) in the uutils coreutils (a Rust rewrite of the standard GNU
coreutils -- ls, cp, rm, cat, sort, etc), which are installed by default
in Ubuntu 25.10. This vulnerability was mitigated in Ubuntu 25.10 before
its release (by replacing the uutils coreutils' rm with the standard GNU
coreutils' rm), and would otherwise have resulted in an LPE (from any
unprivileged user to full root) in the default installation of Ubuntu Desktop 25.10.
Shurely Shome mistake, not a vuln in holy rust!
dgxyz 24 minutes ago [-]
Rewrite tools in new language, get new exciting bugs!
delamon 1 hours ago [-]
Rust cannot help you if race condition crosses API boundary. No matter what language you use, you have to think about system as a whole. Failure to do that results in bugs like this
bangaladore 1 hours ago [-]
The bigger problem here is it seems like the rust utilities were rushed to be released without extensive testing or security analysis because simply because they are written in rust. And this isn't the first serious flaw because of that.
Doesn't surprise me coming from Canonical though.
At least that's the vibe I'm getting from [1] and definitely [2]
> Performance is a frequently cited rationale for “Rewrite it in Rust” projects. While performance is high on my list of priorities, it’s not the primary driver behind this change. These utilities are at the heart of the distribution - and it’s the enhanced resilience and safety that is more easily achieved with Rust ports that are most attractive to me.
> The Rust language, its type system and its borrow checker (and its community!) work together to encourage developers to write safe, sound, resilient software. With added safety comes an increase in security guarantees, and with an increase in security comes an increase in overall resilience of the system - and where better to start than with the foundational tools that build the distribution?
So yes, it sounds like the primary official reason is "enhanced resilience and safety". Given that, I would be interested in seeing the number of security problems in each implementation over time. GNU coreutils does have problems from time to time, but... https://app.opencve.io/cve/?product=coreutils&vendor=gnu only seems to list 10 CVEs since 2005. Unfortunately I can't find an equivalent for uutils, but just from news coverage I'm pretty sure they have a worse track record thus far.
ifh-hn 1 hours ago [-]
I wonder if, and this is just speculating not trying to start an arguement, if this sort of thing could have happened in the simpler pre-snap, pre-systemd systems? More to the point is this a cause of using more complicated software?
dogleash 1 hours ago [-]
Permission and timing gotchas in /tmp predate snap and systemd. It's why things like `mkstemp` exist.
I remember cron jobs that did what systemd-tmpfiles-clean does before it existed. All unix daemons using /tmp run the risk of misusing /tmp. I don't know snap well enough to say anything about it makes it uniquely more susceptible to that.
SoftTalker 27 minutes ago [-]
The mistake seems to be using a predictable path (/tmp/.snap) in a publicly-writable directory.
Rendered at 19:37:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The article linked in the submission is more verbose but less clear and half of it is an advertisement for their product.
Shurely Shome mistake, not a vuln in holy rust!
Doesn't surprise me coming from Canonical though.
At least that's the vibe I'm getting from [1] and definitely [2]
[1] https://cdn2.qualys.com/advisory/2026/03/17/snap-confine-sys... [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rust-coreutils/+bu...
> But… why?
> Performance is a frequently cited rationale for “Rewrite it in Rust” projects. While performance is high on my list of priorities, it’s not the primary driver behind this change. These utilities are at the heart of the distribution - and it’s the enhanced resilience and safety that is more easily achieved with Rust ports that are most attractive to me.
> The Rust language, its type system and its borrow checker (and its community!) work together to encourage developers to write safe, sound, resilient software. With added safety comes an increase in security guarantees, and with an increase in security comes an increase in overall resilience of the system - and where better to start than with the foundational tools that build the distribution?
So yes, it sounds like the primary official reason is "enhanced resilience and safety". Given that, I would be interested in seeing the number of security problems in each implementation over time. GNU coreutils does have problems from time to time, but... https://app.opencve.io/cve/?product=coreutils&vendor=gnu only seems to list 10 CVEs since 2005. Unfortunately I can't find an equivalent for uutils, but just from news coverage I'm pretty sure they have a worse track record thus far.
I remember cron jobs that did what systemd-tmpfiles-clean does before it existed. All unix daemons using /tmp run the risk of misusing /tmp. I don't know snap well enough to say anything about it makes it uniquely more susceptible to that.