CLOUDIMPOSER: EXECUTING CODE ON MILLIONS OF GOOGLE SERVERS WITH A SINGLE MALICIOUS PACKAGE

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

Tenable discovered a vulnerability affecting GCP Cloud Composer that could allow for RCE via a dependency confusion attack. GCP suggests in its documentation that customers utilize the --extra-index-url argument when using PyPI packages from a private repository and follows this guidance internally as well. Tenable researchers discovered that when a package with the same name exists in a public and private repository, pip will prioritize the higher versioned package, whether private or public, and will prioritize the public repository if the package is pinned. This allowed Tenable to identify a package used by Cloud Composer that did not exist in the public PyPI repository and create it themselves, which could have led to RCE if used maliciously. Google has remediated the issue by switching to using the --index-url argument.