What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-54540: Authenticated terminal command whitelist bypass in Pheditor

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-07-27 · updated 2026-07-27
• Weakness: CWE-78

Description

Pheditor is a single-file editor and file manager written in PHP. Prior to version 2.0.5, there is an authenticated terminal command whitelist bypass. The terminal feature checks whether the submitted command starts with one of the configured TERMINAL_COMMANDS values, then passes the full command string to shell_exec(). Shell command substitution such as $() is not blocked, so an authenticated user with the terminal permission can bypass a restricted command allowlist and execute arbitrary shell commands as the web server user. This issue has been patched in version 2.0.5.

Affected products

• pheditor: before 2.0.5

References

• https://github.com/pheditor/pheditor/releases/tag/2.0.5
• https://github.com/pheditor/pheditor/security/advisories/GHSA-9643-6xjp-vx57
• https://github.com/pheditor/pheditor/security/advisories/GHSA-9643-6xjp-vx57

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