CVE-2022-48337

Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2023-02-20 · 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 etags program. For example, a victim may use the "etags -u *" command (suggested in the etags documentation) in a situation where the current working directory has contents that depend on untrusted input.

Affected products

Debian Linux: 11.0
GNU Emacs: through 28.2

References

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=01a4035c869b91c153af9a9132c87adb7669ea1c
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2023/05/msg00008.html
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/FLPQ4K6H2S5TY3L5UDN4K4B3L5RQJYQ6/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/U6HDBUQNAH2WL4MHWCTUZLN7NGF7CHTK/
https://www.debian.org/security/2023/dsa-5360
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=01a4035c869b91c153af9a9132c87adb7669ea1c
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2023/05/msg00008.html
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/FLPQ4K6H2S5TY3L5UDN4K4B3L5RQJYQ6/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/U6HDBUQNAH2WL4MHWCTUZLN7NGF7CHTK/
https://www.debian.org/security/2023/dsa-5360

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