Fickling check_safety() bypass: likely_safe_imports grants module-origin trust to unvalidated standard library callables
- Last modified
- Where the record stands: published, rejected by its publisher, or superseded by another id.What do these mean? →
- published
- Whether CISA lists it in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: proof that attackers are using it.What do these mean? →
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Whether working attack code is public (Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or GitHub). Public code makes attacks easier.What do these mean? →
- None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
Summary
Fickling, Trail of Bits' Python pickle analysis and safety-checking tool, is affected. Its safety check can wrongly return a "likely safe" verdict for malicious pickle payloads that run code or write files through standard library functions, and fickling.load() then passes such payloads to pickle.loads(), allowing arbitrary code execution in the victim process.
Summarized by anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5. Verify details against the original sources.
Read the original description
In Trail of Bits fickling through 0.1.12, the _process_import() method in fickle.py adds an imported name to the likely_safe_imports set whenever the source module is present in sys.stdlib_module_names and the name is absent from the UNSAFE_IMPORTS denylist, without inspecting what the name resolves to or how it behaves. The OvertlyBadEvals analysis pass in analysis.py then unconditionally skips any call whose function name appears in likely_safe_imports, including calls that would otherwise be flagged as overtly dangerous. As a result, any callable reachable through a non-blocked standard library module inherits module-level trust regardless of its own behavior, and check_safety() returns LIKELY_SAFE with zero findings for pickle payloads that reach code execution or file write through such callables. Demonstrated primitives: dataclasses._create_fn, which passes an attacker-controlled function body to exec() and yields arbitrary code execution on Python 3.7 through 3.12 (the internal _create_fn function was removed in Python 3.13); mailcap.findmatch, which internally calls os.system() on a test command taken from an attacker-controlled caps dictionary, yielding arbitrary code execution on Python versions through 3.12 (the mailcap module was removed in Python 3.13); and readline.add_history() followed by readline.write_history_file(), which writes attacker-controlled content to an arbitrary filesystem path (POSIX platforms, where the readline module is available). fickling.load() chains check_safety() into pickle.loads() as an explicit security gate, so a LIKELY_SAFE verdict causes the payload to be deserialized and executed with the privileges of the victim process. The root cause is the inference of callable safety from module origin; it is independent of, and separately fixable from, the dotted qualname resolution weakness tracked as CVE-2026-118938, which this advisory does not address. As of 2026-10-30 the three demonstrated modules were added to UNSAFE_IMPORTS on the vendor master branch (commit d011709) pending release; released versions through 0.1.12 remain affected, and the module-origin trust root cause persists, as demonstrated by the related CVE-2026-118938 remaining exploitable on that same build.
Timeline
- CVE published
- First seen by cve.now
Affected versions
- fickling
through 0.1.12