CVE-2019-13638

Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 4.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2019-07-26 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-78

Description

GNU patch through 2.7.6 is vulnerable to OS shell command injection that can be exploited by opening a crafted patch file that contains an ed style diff payload with shell metacharacters. The ed editor does not need to be present on the vulnerable system. This is different from CVE-2018-1000156.

Affected products

Debian Linux: 8.0, 9.0, 10.0
GNU patch: 2.7.6

References

http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/154124/GNU-patch-Command-Injection-Directory-Traversal.html
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:2798
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:2964
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:3757
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:3758
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:4061
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/patch.git/commit/?id=3fcd042d26d70856e826a42b5f93dc4854d80bf0
https://github.com/irsl/gnu-patch-vulnerabilities
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/SVWWGISFWACROJJPVJJL4UBLVZ7LPOLT/
https://seclists.org/bugtraq/2019/Aug/29
https://seclists.org/bugtraq/2019/Jul/54
https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2019-13638

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