Nx: OS command injection via nx.json plugin options in @nx/maven and @nx/gradle

Summary

@nx/maven and @nx/gradle spawn their project-graph analyzers through a shell and interpolate plugin options read from nx.json straight into the command line. Because a shell parses the whole line, an option value containing shell syntax is executed as a command by any nx command that constructs the project graph. Anyone who clones a hostile repository, or who checks out a pull request that edits nx.json, runs the injected command with their own privileges.

Severity

A victim who runs an ordinary nx command in an attacker-supplied Maven or Gradle workspace gets code execution as themselves. In most such workspaces an attacker who can write nx.json can already run code through the repository's build files (./mvnw, pom.xml, and the Gradle equivalents), so the genuinely new exposure is narrow — for example CI building a fork's pull request where nx.json is writable but the build files are not. We have no evidence of exploitation in the wild.

Affected & Patched Versions

[!IMPORTANT] Workspaces that register neither @nx/maven nor @nx/gradle in nx.json are unaffected — the vulnerable code only runs from those plugins' graph-construction paths, and no other Nx plugin shares this pattern.

Remediation

Upgrade to 22.7.9 (22.x line) or 23.1.2 (23.x line) or later:

nx migrate 23.1.2

Upgrade both nx and the affected plugin (@nx/maven and/or @nx/gradle). The plugin's fix depends on code that ships in the nx package, so bumping the plugin without a matching nx upgrade will not resolve it.

There is no configuration to change — upgrading is the whole fix. If you cannot upgrade yet, only run nx commands in repositories you trust, since a malicious nx.json can execute code on a vulnerable version.

Details

Both plugins spawn their analyzer through a shell and interpolate nx.json plugin options into the command, so those option values are shell source. For Maven the injectable value is the targetNamePrefix option; for Gradle it is broader, since every plugin option is mapped into a -P argument and arbitrary option names are accepted, making both the name and value of any option injectable.

Credits

• Arkadiusz Marta (RE:SOURCE) — Reporter