Vulnerability-Lookup

UBUNTU-CVE-2021-42740 (CVE-2021-42740)

Vulnerability from osv_ubuntu – Published: 2021-10-21 15:15 – Updated: 2026-06-09 10:45 – Source website

Details

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.

Severity

9.8 (Critical)


                    
                      CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

N/A (UNKNOWN)


                    
                      medium

References

URL

Type

	https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2021-42740	REPORT
	https://github.com/substack/node-shell-quote/comm…	REPORT
	https://www.npmjs.com/package/shell-quote	REPORT
	https://github.com/substack/node-shell-quote/blob…	REPORT
	https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2021-42740	REPORT

JSON

To clipboard

{
  "affected": [
    {
      "ecosystem_specific": {
        "binaries": [
          {
            "binary_name": "node-shell-quote",
            "binary_version": "1.6.1+20160617-git72fb5a8ce29b-1ubuntu0.1~esm1"
          }
        ]
      },
      "package": {
        "ecosystem": "Ubuntu:Pro:18.04:LTS",
        "name": "node-shell-quote",
        "purl": "pkg:deb/ubuntu/node-shell-quote@1.6.1+20160617-git72fb5a8ce29b-1ubuntu0.1~esm1?arch=source\u0026distro=esm-apps/bionic"
      },
      "ranges": [
        {
          "events": [
            {
              "introduced": "0"
            }
          ],
          "type": "ECOSYSTEM"
        }
      ],
      "versions": [
        "1.6.1+20160617-git72fb5a8ce29b-1",
        "1.6.1+20160617-git72fb5a8ce29b-1ubuntu0.1~esm1"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "aliases": [],
  "details": "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.",
  "id": "UBUNTU-CVE-2021-42740",
  "modified": "2026-06-09T10:45:58Z",
  "published": "2021-10-21T15:15:00Z",
  "references": [
    {
      "type": "REPORT",
      "url": "https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2021-42740"
    },
    {
      "type": "REPORT",
      "url": "https://github.com/substack/node-shell-quote/commit/5799416ed454aa4ec9afafc895b4e31760ea1abe"
    },
    {
      "type": "REPORT",
      "url": "https://www.npmjs.com/package/shell-quote"
    },
    {
      "type": "REPORT",
      "url": "https://github.com/substack/node-shell-quote/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#173"
    },
    {
      "type": "REPORT",
      "url": "https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2021-42740"
    }
  ],
  "related": [],
  "schema_version": "1.7.0",
  "severity": [
    {
      "score": "CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H",
      "type": "CVSS_V3"
    },
    {
      "score": "medium",
      "type": "Ubuntu"
    }
  ],
  "upstream": [
    "CVE-2021-42740"
  ]
}

CVE-2021-42740 (GCVE-0-2021-42740)

Vulnerability from cvelistv5 – Published: 2021-10-21 14:46 – Updated: 2024-08-04 03:38

Summary

Severity

No CVSS data available.

CWE

Assigner

mitre mitre root

References

3 references

URL	Tags
https://www.npmjs.com/package/shell-quote	x_refsource_MISC
https://github.com/substack/node-shell-quote/blob…	x_refsource_CONFIRM
https://github.com/substack/node-shell-quote/comm…	x_refsource_CONFIRM

Show details on NVD website

JSON

To clipboard

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          "dateUpdated": "2024-08-04T03:38:50.098Z",
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            "url": "https://github.com/substack/node-shell-quote/commit/5799416ed454aa4ec9afafc895b4e31760ea1abe"
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Sightings

Author	Source	Type	Date	Other

Nomenclature

Seen: The vulnerability was mentioned, discussed, or observed by the user.
Confirmed: The vulnerability has been validated from an analyst's perspective.
Published Proof of Concept: A public proof of concept is available for this vulnerability.
Exploited: The vulnerability was observed as exploited by the user who reported the sighting.
Patched: The vulnerability was observed as successfully patched by the user who reported the sighting.
Not exploited: The vulnerability was not observed as exploited by the user who reported the sighting.
Not confirmed: The user expressed doubt about the validity of the vulnerability.
Not patched: The vulnerability was not observed as successfully patched by the user who reported the sighting.

Detection rules are retrieved from Rulezet.

The MITRE ATT&CK techniques below are AI-generated suggestions, inferred from the description of the vulnerability by the CIRCL/vulnerability-attack-technique-classification-roberta-base model, served locally by ML-Gateway. They have not been verified by an analyst and are provided for guidance only.
The approach is described in our paper Mapping CVEs to MITRE ATT&CK Techniques: A Curated Gold-Set Classifier and the Limits of LLM-Assisted Label Expansion.
Browse all ATT&CK techniques and the vulnerabilities related to each.

Related by attack behaviour

Vulnerabilities whose description is nearest to this one in the vector space of the CIRCL/vulnerability-attack-technique-biencoder model. This is a similarity search over the bi-encoder space (plain cosine), not a classification, and it has no measured accuracy.