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GHSA-pfq2-hh62-7m96

MediumCVSS 6.7 / 10
Published Jan 13, 2026·Last modified Feb 3, 2026
Affected Components(0)

No affected components available

Description

Summary

Renovate can be tricked into executing shell code while updating the Gradle Wrapper. A malicious distributionUrl in gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties can lead to command execution in the Renovate runtime.

Details

When Renovate handles Gradle Wrapper artifacts, it may run a wrapper update command such as:

  • ./gradlew :wrapper --gradle-distribution-url <value>

In the observed behavior, Renovate executes this via a shell (e.g., /bin/sh -c ...).
If distributionUrl contains shell command substitution syntax like $(...), the shell evaluates it before Gradle validates/parses the URL.

After that, Gradle attempts to parse the URL as a URI and fails with URISyntaxException, but the shell substitution has already executed.

This is reproducible even when allowScripts is disabled (default is OFF), because this execution happens as part of Gradle Wrapper artifact handling rather than “repository install scripts”.

Prerequisites / attack conditions:

  • The attacker must be able to get a malicious gradle-wrapper.properties into a repository that Renovate scans (e.g., direct write access, or a maintainer merges an attacker’s change/PR).
  • Renovate must be configured to process Gradle Wrapper updates/artifacts for that repository (default behavior for the Gradle Wrapper manager).

PoC

  1. Create a repository with a Gradle Wrapper (gradlew, gradlew.bat, gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.jar, and gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties).
  2. Set distributionUrl in gradle-wrapper.properties to include $(...).
  3. Run Renovate against the repository.
  4. Observe that a file is created during Renovate’s wrapper update step before Gradle fails with URISyntaxException.

A screen recording is attached showing end-to-end reproduction. In the demo, the payload creates /tmp/passwd_dump containing /etc/passwd, demonstrating that file read/exfiltration is possible within the Renovate execution context.

Impact

This allows arbitrary command execution in the Renovate runtime during Gradle Wrapper updates. Depending on deployment, this may expose credentials/tokens available to the bot and may allow an attacker to modify repositories or access internal resources reachable from the Renovate environment.

Remediation

Upgrading to Renovate 42.68.5 (2025-12-31) fixes this issue, and closes out other risks of shell evaluation for commands run by Renovate.

If using the composer, yarn (v1) or flux managers, please upgrade to 42.74.5 (2026-01-08), as there were follow-up fixes to keep these managers working.

Risk Scores
Base Score
6.7

The vulnerability requires local access to the device to be exploited. It is easy for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker needs high-level or administrative privileges. No user interaction is needed for the attacker to exploit this vulnerability. The impact is confined to the system where the vulnerability exists. There is a high impact on the confidentiality of the information. There is a high impact on the integrity of the data. There is a high impact on the availability of the system.

Threat Intelligence
6.1

Exploitation attempts have been detected. Elevated vigilance and prompt remediation are advised.

EPSS
N/A

Probability that this vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days.

Exploit
Not available

We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.

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Medium severity
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