What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-4515

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2022-12-20 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-78

Description

A flaw was found in Exuberant Ctags in the way it handles the "-o" option. This option specifies the tag filename. A crafted tag filename specified in the command line or in the configuration file results in arbitrary command execution because the externalSortTags() in sort.c calls the system(3) function in an unsafe way.

Affected products

• Debian Linux: 10.0
• Exuberant Ctags Project Exuberant Ctags: all versions

References

• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/12/msg00040.html
• https://sourceforge.net/p/ctags/code/HEAD/tree/tags/ctags-5.8/sort.c#l56
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/12/msg00040.html
• https://sourceforge.net/p/ctags/code/HEAD/tree/tags/ctags-5.8/sort.c#l56

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