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Fencer Vulns
medium 4.6

CVE-2026-80430 json

Improper link resolution in the kitty drag and drop protocol allows a client to create files outside the staging directory

published 2026-09-25 44 d ago modified 2026-09-29 40 d ago also EUVD-2026-87063

cvss
4.6
version 4.0, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 4%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Improper Link Resolution Before File Access in the drag source staging path of the drag and drop protocol in kitty from 0.47.0 before 0.49.0 allows a program writing to the terminal to create files and directories at paths outside the staging directory, because subdir_data_for_drag() in kitty/dnd.c resolves a descendant of the staged item tree by constructing a path string and opening it with safe_open(path, O_DIRECTORY | O_RDONLY, 0) rather than by walking the tree one component at a time, so a client that declares two entries with the same name, the first a symlink whose target is an arbitrary absolute path and the second a directory, causes mkdirat() to fail with EEXIST, which the code ignores, and causes the subsequent path resolution to follow the symlink and return a directory descriptor outside the staging directory, which is then passed as the dirfd argument to add_payload() and used for every further create operation on that item and its descendants. Entry names are sanitised against path separators and dot components, but symlink targets are not validated. Files are created with O_CREAT | O_WRONLY | O_EXCL at mode 0644, so existing files cannot be overwritten, and directories are created with mkdirat() at mode 0755, so the attacker can create intermediate directories that did not previously exist. This results in the creation of files and directories at any path writable by the user running kitty, provided the symlink target is an existing directory.

Patch / fix

  • Kovid Goyal kitty 0.49.0

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2026-80430 updated cvss 3.3

kitty: improper link resolution in the kitty drag and drop protocol allows a client to create files outside the staging directory

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
44 d ago

Exploit prediction

0.15% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 4% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 4.0 4.6 CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:N/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:L/SA:N
CNA 4.0 4.6 CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:N/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:L/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X

Affected products

  • Kovid Goyal kitty

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-59 Improper Link Resolution Before File Access

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.