Medium · published August 25, 2026
rclone versions >= v1.72.0 and <= v1.74.4 (fixed in v1.75.0) contain multiple denial-of-service vulnerabilities in the archive backend's SquashFS parser, which relies on the github.com/diskfs/go-diskfs dependency. The parser fails to validate attacker-controlled superblock and metadata values before use. An attacker who can place or modify a SquashFS image in storage exposed through an rclone :archive: remote can craft a malicious image that triggers an integer division-by-zero panic (zero block size), an out-of-bounds slice panic (out-of-range inode metadata offset), or a non-progress CPU loop (truncated metadata stream). Variants 1 and 2 terminate the rclone process and, via 'rclone serve sftp', can crash the entire SFTP server; variant 3 causes sustained CPU consumption. Parsing is lazy, so a victim or remote client must address or descend into the malicious archive object to trigger it.