What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-43893: exiftool-vendored: Argument injection via newline characters in tag names
- Severity: high (CVSS 8.2 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: 2026-05-11 · updated 2026-10-26
- Weakness: CWE-88
Description
exiftool-vendored provides cross-platform Node.js access to ExifTool. Prior to 35.19.0, exiftool-vendored starts ExifTool in -stay_open True -@ - mode, where arguments are read from stdin one per line. In affected versions, several caller-supplied strings were interpolated into ExifTool arguments without rejecting line delimiters. A newline or carriage return inside one of those strings could split a single intended argument into multiple ExifTool arguments, allowing argument injection. The fix also rejects NUL bytes as unsafe control characters. Applications that pass attacker-controlled strings to affected APIs may allow an attacker to make ExifTool read files accessible to the ExifTool process, or write output to attacker-chosen file system paths accessible to that process. No remote code execution has been demonstrated. This vulnerability is fixed in 35.19.0.
Affected products
- photostructure exiftool-vendored.js: before 35.19.0
References
Get alerted when CVE-2026-43893 or the next vulnerability affects your stack