Executive brief
Coolify is a self-hosted platform-as-a-service tool for deploying applications and services. Authenticated users can inject malicious shell commands through improperly escaped environment variable names in Docker commands executed on managed servers, allowing them to gain unauthorized code execution on the host system outside of container sandboxing.
Technical details
The vulnerability is a shell command injection flaw in Coolify's Docker command execution layer. When executing Docker commands over SSH on managed servers, Coolify fails to properly escape environment variable key names, allowing authenticated attackers to inject shell metacharacters and arbitrary commands. An attacker with valid Coolify credentials can set specially crafted environment variable keys that break out of the intended Docker command context and execute arbitrary shell commands on the host. The vulnerability requires authentication to Coolify and affects versions before 4.2.0; a patch is available in version 4.2.0 and later.
Affected products
- Coolify Coolify before 4.2.0
Timeline
- 2026-09-02: disclosed