Executive brief
The uniget package manager CLI uses the EDITOR environment variable to launch a text editor when managing system hooks. A flaw in how it parses this variable allows an attacker to inject arbitrary shell commands by crafting a malicious EDITOR value. When a user attempts to edit hooks, the injected commands execute with the user's privileges, potentially compromising system integrity and allowing unauthorized code execution.
Technical details
The vulnerability exists in hooks.go at line 199, where the code uses strings.Split(editor, " ") to parse the EDITOR environment variable into command and arguments. This naive approach does not respect shell syntax and treats shell metacharacters as literal argument separators. An attacker can craft EDITOR="/path/to/wrapper && id && echo" which splits into ["wrapper", "&&", "id", "&&", "echo"], allowing execution of the "id" command or other arbitrary payloads. The vulnerable code path is triggered when users invoke "uniget hooks edit" to modify hook configurations. No authentication or special privileges are required; the attacker only needs to set the EDITOR environment variable in the user's shell session. A patch is available in version 0.27.6 that properly handles environment variable parsing.
Affected products
- uniget-org uniget CLI < 0.27.6
Timeline
- 2026-06-10: disclosed: Vulnerability published to GitHub Advisory Database
- 2026-06-10: patched: Version 0.27.6 released with fix
- 2026-08-17: advisory: Advisory updated in GitHub Advisory Database