What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-41253

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2026-04-18 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-829

Description

In iTerm2 through 3.6.9, displaying a .txt file can cause code execution via DCS 2000p and OSC 135 data, if the working directory contains a malicious file whose name is valid output from the conductor encoding path, such as a pathname with an initial ace/c+ substring, aka "hypothetical in-band signaling abuse." This occurs because iTerm2 accepts the SSH conductor protocol from terminal output that does not originate from a legitimate conductor session.

Affected products

• iTerm2: through 3.6.9

References

• https://blog.calif.io/p/mad-bugs-even-cat-readmetxt-is-not
• https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/commit/a9e745993c2e2cbb30b884a16617cd5495899f86
• https://iterm2.com/downloads.html
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47809190

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