CVE-2026-19547: Local Privilege Escalation in Ghostscript for Windows

Severity: high (CVSS 7.0 v4.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2026-09-29 · updated 2026-09-30
Weakness: CWE-426

Description

Ghostscript for Windows is vulnerable to local privilege escalation through PostScript resource file hijacking. Due to the application searching for PostScript resource files in predictable paths under C:\\gs\\ that do not exist by default on Windows installations, combined with Windows default ACLs allowing any authenticated user to create directories at the root of C:\\, an attacker who is an authenticated local user can create the expected directory structure and plant a malicious PostScript file. When any user or service subsequently runs Ghostscript, the planted file is automatically loaded and executed with the full privileges of the Ghostscript process. This results in full compromise of Ghostscript process context, as well as running arbitrary code on the machine with Ghostscript process privileges. This issue was fixed in version 10.08.0.

Affected products

Artifex Ghostscript: before 10.08.0 — fixed in 10.08.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Artifex Ghostscript 10.08.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2026-19547 or the next vulnerability affects your stack