| Package | Affected versions | Patched versions |
|---|---|---|
| github.com/rclone/rclone | < 1.75.0 | 1.75.0 |
rclone interpolates remote SFTP paths into PowerShell hash commands. Its quoting helper escapes only ASCII apostrophe, although PowerShell accepts four Unicode smart quotes as single-quote delimiters. An attacker-controlled filename can therefore terminate the intended path literal and append PowerShell statements executed as the victim's SSH account.
a0c09f1381ae93e2a9a33c529d170186c61ad058backend/sftpbackend/sftp/sftp.go:1802-1812 — PowerShell hash commandsbackend/sftp/sftp.go:1663-1699 — Fs.runbackend/sftp/sftp.go:1988-2067 — Object.Hashbackend/sftp/sftp.go:2071-2090 — quoteOrEscapeShellPathFor PowerShell, quoteOrEscapeShellPath wraps a path in ASCII apostrophes and doubles only U+0027:
return "'" + strings.ReplaceAll(shellPath, "'", "''") + "'", nil
Windows PowerShell also treats U+2018, U+2019, U+201A, and U+201B as single-quote delimiters. Those characters pass through the rclone encoder and can close the quoted path. The completed string is sent as shell source through an SSH exec request.
The security boundary fails because shell syntax is constructed by string concatenation rather than passing data through a non-code channel.
Set-Content statement created a marker file.Object.Hash path and MD5 PowerShell command against a fake SSH session backed by local PowerShell.Get-FileHash to complete; the appended statement then executed.Running one of these products? Scan your site to see whether it exposes a vulnerable version.
Scan my site freeReproduction outline:
Successful exploitation provides arbitrary command execution as the victim's SSH account. This can permit file theft, modification, deletion, credential access, persistence, and lateral movement allowed by that account.
The attacker needs filename-control capability but does not need the victim's SSH credentials or an interactive shell. The rclone user's hash operation supplies the execution step.