CVE-2008-2142

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.8 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 3.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2008-05-12 · updated 2026-06-16

Description

Emacs 21 and XEmacs automatically load and execute .flc (fast lock) files that are associated with other files that are edited within Emacs, which allows user-assisted attackers to execute arbitrary code.

Affected products

GNU Emacs: 21.3.1
GNU Xemacs: all versions

References

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-05/msg00645.html
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2008-06/msg00001.html
http://secunia.com/advisories/30199
http://secunia.com/advisories/30216
http://secunia.com/advisories/30303
http://secunia.com/advisories/30581
http://secunia.com/advisories/30827
http://secunia.com/advisories/34004
http://security.gentoo.org/glsa/glsa-200902-06.xml
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/96903
http://tracker.xemacs.org/XEmacs/its/issue378
http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Advisories:rPSA-2008-0177

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