What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-41716: Unsanitized NUL in environment variables on Windows in syscall and os/exec

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2022-11-02 · updated 2026-06-17

Description

Due to unsanitized NUL values, attackers may be able to maliciously set environment variables on Windows. In syscall.StartProcess and os/exec.Cmd, invalid environment variable values containing NUL values are not properly checked for. A malicious environment variable value can exploit this behavior to set a value for a different environment variable. For example, the environment variable string "A=B\x00C=D" sets the variables "A=B" and "C=D".

Affected products

• Go: before 1.18.8; from 1.19.0 before 1.19.3 — fixed in 1.18.8, 1.19.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Go 1.18.8, 1.19.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://go.dev/cl/446916
• https://go.dev/issue/56284
• https://groups.google.com/g/golang-announce/c/mbHY1UY3BaM/m/hSpmRzk-AgAJ
• https://pkg.go.dev/vuln/GO-2022-1095
• https://go.dev/cl/446916
• https://go.dev/issue/56284
• https://groups.google.com/g/golang-announce/c/mbHY1UY3BaM/m/hSpmRzk-AgAJ
• https://pkg.go.dev/vuln/GO-2022-1095
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20230120-0007/

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