CVE-2023-39956: Electron: Out-of-package code execution when launched with arbitrary cwd

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.6 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2023-09-06 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-94

Description

Electron is a framework which lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Electron apps that are launched as command line executables are impacted. Specifically this issue can only be exploited if the following conditions are met: 1. The app is launched with an attacker-controlled working directory and 2. The attacker has the ability to write files to that working directory. This makes the risk quite low, in fact normally issues of this kind are considered outside of our threat model as similar to Chromium we exclude Physically Local Attacks but given the ability for this issue to bypass certain protections like ASAR Integrity it is being treated with higher importance. This issue has been fixed in versions:`26.0.0-beta.13`, `25.4.1`, `24.7.1`, `23.3.13`, and `22.3.19`. There are no app side workarounds, users must update to a patched version of Electron.

Affected products

electron: before 22.3.9; from 23.0.0 before 23.3.13; from 24.0.0 before 24.7.1; from 25.0.0 before 25.5.0; 26.0.0-alpha1, 26.0.0-alpha2, 26.0.0-alpha3, 26.0.0-alpha4, 26.0.0-alpha5, 26.0.0-alpha6 (+14) — fixed in 22.3.9, 23.3.13, 24.7.1, 25.5.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: electron 22.3.9, 23.3.13, 24.7.1, 25.5.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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