Cargo between 1.68 and 1.96 incorrectly normalized the URLs of third-party registries using the sparse index protocol. If a hosting provider allowed multiple registries to be hosted with arbitrary names within the same domain, an attacker able to publish crates in a registry could obtain the credentials of others users of the same registry. The severity of the vulnerability is low, due to the extremely niche requirements needed to achieve the attack.
Rust 1.96, to be released on May 28th, 2026, will update Cargo to only strip the .git suffix from registry URLs using the git protocol. No mitigations are available for users of older versions of Cargo.