Untrusted search path on Windows

Issue

Snowflake discovered and remediated a vulnerability in the Snowflake JDBC Driver. When the EXTERNALBROWSER authentication method is used on Windows, an attacker with write access to a directory in the %PATH% can escalate their privileges to the user that runs the vulnerable JDBC Driver version.

This vulnerability affects versions 3.2.3 through 3.21.0 on Windows. Snowflake fixed the issue in version 3.22.0.

Vulnerability Details

When the EXTERNALBROWSER authentication method is selected, the Snowflake JDBC Driver on non-macOS operating systems tries to open the SSO URL using xdg-open. Because xdg-open is a Linux program that doesn’t exist in a default Windows installation, a sufficiently privileged attacker could place a malicious executable in one of the directories on the %PATH% and achieve local privilege escalation to the user running the JDBC Driver.

Solution

Snowflake released version 3.22.0 of the Snowflake JDBC Driver, which fixes this issue. We recommend users upgrade to version 3.22.0.

Additional Information

If you discover a security vulnerability in one of our products or websites, please report the issue to HackerOne. For more information, please see our [Vulnerability Disclosure Policy](https://hackerone.com/snowflake?type=team).