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Security: WhyNotHugo/rust-rrule

Security

SECURITY.md

Security

We try to make the crate safe for use by arbitrary users/public APIs, but we can not guarantee the security of it at this point.

The 3 problems we are currently mostly worried about are:

Denial of Service (DoS) by panic

If the user is able to trigger a case where it able to panic the code, it could crash the application or server. This can be limited by using catch_unwind. Make sure to read the documentation! This does not work if the panic = "abort" setting is set to abort. It is not advised to reuse RRule, RRuleSet or iterators after it has panicked.

Disabling overflow checks using compiler flags might result in unexpected results and crashes. So this is strongly discouraged.

When the validation limits are disabled, this problem will be much more prevalent. Numbers might overflow in some cases.

Denial of Service (DoS) by CPU exhaustion

The spec allows for infinitely recurring events or searches for a datetime that meets the requirements but doesn't exist. There are various protections for this built into the crate. But in order to hit these limits, it might take a few seconds depending on the CPU speed.

This problem can be mitigated by spawning the process in a separate thread and stopping the thread if it hits the timeout. On decent CPUs this might not be a big issue.

Note that by disabling the validation limits this problem will be made MUCH more significant.

Denial of Service (DoS) by memory exhaustion

The spec allows for infinitely recurring events. Thus, the iterator might be practically infinite. So when not setting a limit over the iterator, it might create a list of events that practically never ends. And thus will continue until it crashes or hangs the system.

This problem can be easily mitigated by limiting the number of events expected. This is also the reason why the rrule.all(limit) function takes a limit.

There aren’t any published security advisories