CVE-2022-45939

Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2022-11-28 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-78

Description

GNU Emacs through 28.2 allows attackers to execute commands via shell metacharacters in the name of a source-code file, because lib-src/etags.c uses the system C library function in its implementation of the ctags program. For example, a victim may use the "ctags *" command (suggested in the ctags documentation) in a situation where the current working directory has contents that depend on untrusted input.

Affected products

Debian Linux: 10.0, 11.0
Fedoraproject Fedora: 36, 37
GNU Emacs: through 28.2

References

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=d48bb4874bc6cd3e69c7a15fc3c91cc141025c51
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/12/msg00046.html
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/FOSK3J7BBAEI4IITW2DRUKLQYUZYKH6Y/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/GOXIH2FDEQJEAARE52C3GHTLGQFBYPIB/
https://www.debian.org/security/2023/dsa-5314
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=d48bb4874bc6cd3e69c7a15fc3c91cc141025c51
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/12/msg00046.html
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/FOSK3J7BBAEI4IITW2DRUKLQYUZYKH6Y/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/GOXIH2FDEQJEAARE52C3GHTLGQFBYPIB/
https://www.debian.org/security/2023/dsa-5314

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