CVE-2021-42740
CRITICAL9.8EPSS 9.0%Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in a Command in Shell-quote
Published: 5/24/2022Modified: 2/4/2026
Description
The shell-quote package before 1.7.3 for Node.js allows command injection. An attacker can inject unescaped shell metacharacters through a regex designed to support Windows drive letters. If the output of this package is passed to a real shell as a quoted argument to a command with `exec()`, an attacker can inject arbitrary commands. This is because the Windows drive letter regex character class is `[A-z]` instead of the correct `[A-Za-z]`. Several shell metacharacters exist in the space between capital letter Z and lower case letter a, such as the backtick character.
Affected packages (2)
- Debian/node-shell-quotefrom 0, < 1.7.3+~1.7.1-1
- npm/shell-quote>= 1.6.3, < 1.7.3
CVSS scores
| Source | Version | Severity | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| osv | CVSS 3.1 | CRITICAL9.8 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H |
References (6)
- ADVISORYhttps://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42740
- ADVISORYhttps://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2021-42740
- PATCHhttps://github.com/ljharb/shell-quote
- WEBhttps://github.com/ljharb/shell-quote/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#173
- WEBhttps://github.com/ljharb/shell-quote/commit/5799416ed454aa4ec9afafc895b4e31760ea1abe
- WEBhttps://www.npmjs.com/package/shell-quote