CVE-2018-20225

Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2020-05-08 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-20

Description

An issue was discovered in pip (all versions) because it installs the version with the highest version number, even if the user had intended to obtain a private package from a private index. This only affects use of the --extra-index-url option, and exploitation requires that the package does not already exist in the public index (and thus the attacker can put the package there with an arbitrary version number). NOTE: it has been reported that this is intended functionality and the user is responsible for using --extra-index-url securely

Affected products

Python Packaging Authority pip: all versions

References

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1835736
https://cowlicks.website/posts/arbitrary-code-execution-from-pips-extra-index-url.html
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rb1adce798445facd032870d644eb39c4baaf9c4a7dd5477d12bb6ab2%40%3Cgithub.arrow.apache.org%3E
https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/news/
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1835736
https://cowlicks.website/posts/arbitrary-code-execution-from-pips-extra-index-url.html
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rb1adce798445facd032870d644eb39c4baaf9c4a7dd5477d12bb6ab2%40%3Cgithub.arrow.apache.org%3E
https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/news/

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