CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-14000 — Mit Scratch-Vm security vulnerability

Critical CVSS 9.8

MIT Lifelong Kindergarten Scratch scratch-vm before 0.2.0-prerelease.20200714185213 loads extension URLs from untrusted project.json files with certain _ characters, resulting in remote code execution because the URL's content is treated as a script and is executed as a worker. The responsible code is getExtensionIdForOpcode in serialization/sb3.js. The use of _ is incompatible with a protection mechanism in older versions, in which URLs were split and consequently deserialization attacks were prevented. NOTE: the scratch.mit.edu hosted service is not affected because of the lack of worker scripts.

Severity
Critical
CVSS
9.8 (3.1)
Published
2020-07-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-502

Affected products

  • mit / scratch-vm

Matched remediation archetype

Unsafe deserialization and object reconstruction

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Check exposure

  • Inventory serialization formats accepted from requests, queues, caches, files, cookies, and cross-service messages.
  • Trace whether untrusted input can select classes, types, callbacks, constructors, or object hooks during decoding.
  • Identify signing, schema validation, trust-boundary, and compatibility settings for each decoder.

Remediate safely

  • Replace native object deserialization with a data-only format and explicit schema validation.
  • If replacement is not immediate, use a safe decoder with a minimal type allowlist and disable polymorphic or executable hooks.
  • Update the affected library and add inert tests for unknown types, extra fields, malformed nesting, and unsigned data.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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