Elizabeth Lin (North Carolina State University), Igibek Koishybayev (North Carolina State University), Trevor Dunlap (North Carolina State University), William Enck (North Carolina State University), Alexandros Kapravelos (North Carolina State University)

With the rise in threats against the software supply chain, developer integrated development environments (IDEs) present an attractive target for attackers. For example, researchers have found extensions for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) that start web servers and can be exploited via JavaScript executing in a web browser on the developer's host. This paper seeks to systematically understand the landscape of vulnerabilities in VS Code's extension marketplace. We identify a set of four sources of untrusted input and three code targets that can be used for code injection and file integrity attacks and use them to design taint analysis rules in CodeQL. We then perform an ecosystem-level analysis of the VS Code extension marketplace, studying 25,402 extensions that contain code. Our results show that while vulnerabilities are not pervasive, they exist and impact millions of users. Specifically, we find 21 extensions with verified proof of concept exploits of code injection attacks impacting a total of over 6 million installations. Through this study, we demonstrate the need for greater attention to the security of IDE extensions.

View More Papers

FirmDiff: Improving the Configuration of Linux Kernels Geared Towards...

Ioannis Angelakopoulos (Boston University), Gianluca Stringhini (Boston University), Manuel Egele (Boston University)

Read More

LoRDMA: A New Low-Rate DoS Attack in RDMA Networks

Shicheng Wang (Tsinghua University), Menghao Zhang (Beihang University & Infrawaves), Yuying Du (Information Engineering University), Ziteng Chen (Southeast University), Zhiliang Wang (Tsinghua University & Zhongguancun Laboratory), Mingwei Xu (Tsinghua University & Zhongguancun Laboratory), Renjie Xie (Tsinghua University), Jiahai Yang (Tsinghua University & Zhongguancun Laboratory)

Read More

QUACK: Hindering Deserialization Attacks via Static Duck Typing

Yaniv David (Columbia University), Neophytos Christou (Brown University), Andreas D. Kellas (Columbia University), Vasileios P. Kemerlis (Brown University), Junfeng Yang (Columbia University)

Read More

LMSanitator: Defending Prompt-Tuning Against Task-Agnostic Backdoors

Chengkun Wei (Zhejiang University), Wenlong Meng (Zhejiang University), Zhikun Zhang (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and Stanford University), Min Chen (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Minghu Zhao (Zhejiang University), Wenjing Fang (Ant Group), Lei Wang (Ant Group), Zihui Zhang (Zhejiang University), Wenzhi Chen (Zhejiang University)

Read More