CVE-2026-113776
Description
A flaw was found in virtualenv. An attacker who can influence an environment's path or prompt setting can achieve arbitrary command execution when a user activates the virtual environment. This issue occurs because activation templates process substitution placeholders sequentially, allowing injected placeholder tokens inside quoted paths or prompts to be re-evaluated and break out of shell quoting in generated activation scripts.
Statement
This vulnerability is rated as Important for Red Hat because arbitrary code execution can occur within the invoking user's context, even though exploitation requires local interaction to activate the environment. In typical Red Hat deployments and automated pipelines, virtual environments are frequently generated and sourced during workload execution or developer workspaces. Exposure is contingent on an attacker being able to supply untrusted destination filesystem paths or prompt parameters that embed internal template substitution tokens.
Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details
Info alert:Important note
CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).
The following CVSS metrics and score provided are preliminary and subject to review.
CVSS v3 Score Breakdown
| Red Hat | NVD | cve.org | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base Score | 7.8 | N/A | 7.8 |
| Attack Vector | Local | N/A | Local |
| Attack Complexity | Low | N/A | Low |
| Privileges Required | None | N/A | None |
| User Interaction | Required | N/A | Required |
| Scope | Unchanged | N/A | Unchanged |
| Confidentiality | High | N/A | High |
| Integrity Impact | High | N/A | High |
| Availability Impact | High | N/A | High |
Vector
Red Hat: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
cve.org: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
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