What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-5223: Crates in third party registries can override the cached source of other crates

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-05-25 · updated 2026-07-23
• Weakness: CWE-61

Description

Cargo incorrectly handled symlinks inside of crate tarballs downloaded from third-party registries, allowing a malicious crate to override the source code of another crate from the same registry. The severity of the vulnerability is **medium** for users of third-party registries. Users of crates.io are **not affected**, as crates.io forbids uploading crates containing any symlink.

Affected products

• rust-lang cargo: before 1.96.0 — fixed in 1.96.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: rust-lang cargo 1.96.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/05/25/cve-2026-5223/
• https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/17031
• https://groups.google.com/g/rustlang-security-announcements/c/IB74S7Yksg8

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