What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-7729: Arbitrary Code Execution

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.6 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 2.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2020-09-03 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-1188

Description

The package grunt before 1.3.0 are vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Execution due to the default usage of the function load() instead of its secure replacement safeLoad() of the package js-yaml inside grunt.file.readYAML.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 18.04
• Debian Linux: 9.0
• gruntjs/grunt: before 1.3.0 — fixed in 1.3.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: gruntjs/grunt 1.3.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt/blob/master/lib/grunt/file.js%23L249
• https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt/commit/e350cea1724eb3476464561a380fb6a64e61e4e7
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/09/msg00008.html
• https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JAVA-ORGWEBJARSNPM-607922
• https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JS-GRUNT-597546
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4595-1/
• https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt/blob/master/lib/grunt/file.js%23L249
• https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt/commit/e350cea1724eb3476464561a380fb6a64e61e4e7
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/09/msg00008.html
• https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JAVA-ORGWEBJARSNPM-607922
• https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JS-GRUNT-597546
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4595-1/

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