Protection Mechanism Failure vulnerability in hexpm hex allows the owner of a package, or an attacker who has taken over the owner's account, to get a newly published release past the release-age cooldown. The cooldown (cooldown config,…

Overview

Protection Mechanism Failure vulnerability in hexpm hex allows the owner of a package, or an attacker who has taken over the owner's account, to get a newly published release past the release-age cooldown.

The cooldown (cooldown config, HEX_COOLDOWN) withholds versions younger than the configured age during dependency resolution. When the release of a package locked in mix.lock is retired or has a security advisory, Hex.RemoteConverger.build_cooldown_bypass/3 and Hex.RemoteConverger.unsafe_lock_bypass/1 lift the cooldown for every version of that package and of every package the locked release depends on, so that mix deps.update can move off the unsafe release. Retiring a release needs the same package owner permission as publishing one. An attacker who publishes a malicious release can retire the currently locked release, and the next mix deps.update that unlocks the package selects the new release regardless of its age. Hex.Registry.Cooldown.versions/2 checks the bypass by package name alone, so the bypass also covers packages with the same name in other repositories. Cooldown configured through an organization dependency policy is not affected.

This issue affects hex: from 2.5.0 before 2.5.2.

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.