New R Programming Vulnerability Exposes Projects to Supply Chain Attacks
Apr 29, 2024
Programming / Supply Chain
 A security vulnerability has been discovered in the R programming language that could be exploited by a threat actor to create a malicious RDS (R Data Serialization) file such that it results in code execution when loaded and referenced.  The flaw, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-27322  (CVSS score: 8.8), "involves the use of promise objects and lazy evaluation in R," AI application security company HiddenLayer said in a report  shared with The Hacker News.  RDS,  like pickle in Python , is a format used to serialize and save the state of data structures or objects in R, an open-source programming language used in statistical computing, data visualization, and machine learning.   This process of serialization – serialize() or saveRDS() – and deserialization – unserialize() and readRDS() – is also leveraged when saving and loading R packages.  The root cause behind CVE-2024-27322 lies in the fact that it could lead to arbitrary code execution when deseriali...