What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2019-16765

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 5.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2019-11-25 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-250

Description

If an attacker can get a user to open a specially prepared directory tree as a workspace in Visual Studio Code with the CodeQL extension active, arbitrary code of the attacker's choosing may be executed on the user's behalf. This is fixed in version 1.0.1 of the extension. Users should upgrade to this version using Visual Studio Code Marketplace's upgrade mechanism. After upgrading, the codeQL.cli.executablePath setting can only be set in the per-user settings, and not in the per-workspace settings. More information about VS Code settings can be found here.

Affected products

• github vscode-codeql: before 1.0.1 — fixed in 1.0.1
• github vscode-codeql: from < 1.0.1 before 1.0.1 — fixed in 1.0.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: github vscode-codeql 1.0.1; github vscode-codeql 1.0.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/github/vscode-codeql/blob/v1.0.1/CHANGELOG.md
• https://github.com/github/vscode-codeql/pull/174
• https://github.com/github/vscode-codeql/security/advisories/GHSA-wf4x-8mpj-r42q
• https://github.com/github/vscode-codeql/blob/v1.0.1/CHANGELOG.md
• https://github.com/github/vscode-codeql/pull/174
• https://github.com/github/vscode-codeql/security/advisories/GHSA-wf4x-8mpj-r42q

Get alerted when CVE-2019-16765 or the next vulnerability affects your stack