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Fencer Vulns
critical 9.8

CVE-2021-42740 json

Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in a Command in Shell-quote

published 2021-10-21 5 y ago modified 2026-09-10 1 mo ago also GHSA-g4rg-993r-mgx7 , EUVD-2022-3886

cvss
9.8
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
4.2%
EPSS 4.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 91%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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.

Patch / fix

  • npm shell-quote 1.7.3
  • shell-quote_project shell-quote 1.7.3
  • node-shell-quote Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 1.7.3+~1.7.1-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2021-42740

  • smdba Manager Server Module 4.2 1.7.11-0.150300.3.12.2
  • drools Manager Server Module 4.2 7.17.0-150300.4.9.2
  • rhnlib Manager Server Module 4.2, Manager Proxy Module 4.2 4.2.7-150300.4.12.2
  • cobbler Manager Server Module 4.2 3.1.2-150300.5.19.1
  • mgr-osad Manager Server Module 4.2, Manager Proxy Module 4.2 4.2.9-150300.2.12.2
  • spacecmd Manager Server Module 4.2, Manager Proxy Module 4.2 4.2.21-150300.4.33.2
  • woodstox Manager Server Module 4.2 4.4.2-150300.3.6.2
  • susemanager Manager Server Module 4.2 4.2.40-150300.3.49.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2023:0592-1SUSE-SU-2022:3761-1SUSE-SU-2022:3314-1SUSE-SU-2022:3313-1

Exploit prediction

4.22% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 91% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 7.5 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
GitHub 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
npm shell-quote
>=1.6.3, <1.7.3
1.7.3

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-77 Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in a Command

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.