What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-73414: Shescape: Shell injection via unescaped parentheses on Windows with CMD

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.2 v4.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-08-12 · updated 2026-10-24
• Weakness: CWE-78

Description

Shescape is a simple shell escape library for JavaScript. Prior to 2.1.14 and 3.0.1, getEscapeFunction in src/internal/win/cmd.js does not escape `(` and `)` when applications use the escape or escapeAll APIs on Windows with shell set to cmd.exe, or with shell set to true when CMD is the default. An attacker-controlled argument can break out of a parenthesized CMD construct and inject shell syntax depending on the original command, resulting in arbitrary command execution. This issue is fixed in versions 2.1.14 and 3.0.1.

Affected products

• ericcornelissen shescape: before 2.1.14; from 3.0.0, < 3.0.1

References

• https://github.com/ericcornelissen/shescape/commit/43d70b59d09bbe5c3fd02ef08b3a123e977ed9de
• https://github.com/ericcornelissen/shescape/commit/b4b34c394e7f9da2775bb75381066b9a228c425f
• https://github.com/ericcornelissen/shescape/pull/2649
• https://github.com/ericcornelissen/shescape/pull/2651
• https://github.com/ericcornelissen/shescape/releases/tag/v2.1.14
• https://github.com/ericcornelissen/shescape/releases/tag/v3.0.1
• https://github.com/ericcornelissen/shescape/security/advisories/GHSA-w4hw-qcx7-56pr

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