CVE-2023-46115: Tauri's Updater Private Keys Possibly Leaked via Vite Environment Variables

This advisory is not describing a vulnerability in the Tauri code base itself but a commonly used misconfiguration which could lead to leaking of the private key and updater key password into bundled Tauri applications using the Vite frontend in a specific configuration.

The Tauri documentation used an insecure example configuration in the Vite guide to showcase how to use Tauri together with Vite.

Copying the following snippet envPrefix: ['VITE_', 'TAURI_'], from this guide into the vite.config.ts of a Tauri project possibly leads to bundling the TAURI_PRIVATE_KEY and TAURI_KEY_PASSWORD into the Vite frontend code and therefore leaking this value to the debug built of a Tauri application.

The value is automatically bundled into debug builds but for production builds it is not embedded, as long as it is not directly referenced in the frontend code. Vite statically replaces these values in production builds. This reduces the amount of affected applications to a very small amount of affected applications.

To verify if you are affected you can search for the private key value or the TAURI_PRIVATE_KEY variable inside the release build frontend assets (dist/).

Example: grep -r "TAURI_PRIVATE_KEY" dist/

Using only the envPrefix: ['VITE_'], or any other framework than Vite means you are not impacted by this advisory.