Vulnerability · Published Oct 22, 2024 · Assigned by GitHub_M

CVE-2024-48919RCE via Prompt Injection Into Cursor's Terminal Cmd-K

Critical 9.2

In plain English

A critical-severity improper input validation in cursor from getcursor. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.5% (higher than 44% of all known vulnerabilities).

Severity (CVSS 4.0)9.2Critical
Exploit odds (30 days)0.5%top 56.2% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

Cursor is a code editor built for programming with AI. Prior to Sep 27, 2024, if a user generated a terminal command via Cursor's Terminal Cmd-K/Ctrl-K feature and if the user explicitly imported a malicious web page into the Terminal Cmd-K prompt, an attacker with control over the referenced web page could have a significant chance of influencing a language model to output arbitrary commands for execution in the user's terminal. This scenario would require the user explicitly opt-in to including the contents of a compromised webpage, and it would require that the attacker display prompt injection text in the the contents of the compromised webpage. A server-side patch to not stream back newlines or control characters was released on September 27, 2024, within two hours of the issue being reported. Additionally, Cursor 0.42 includes client-side mitigations to prevent any newline or control character from being streamed into the terminal directly. It also contains a new setting, `"cursor.terminal.usePreviewBox"`, which, if set to true, streams the response into a preview box whose contents then have to be manually accepted before being inserted into the terminal. This setting is useful if you're working in a shell environment where commands can be executed without pressing enter or any control character. The patch has been applied server-side, so no additional action is needed, even on older versions of Cursor. Separately, Cursor's maintainers also recommend, as best practice, to only include trusted pieces of context in prompts.

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
getcursor cursor < 0.42

Weakness: CWE-20 · Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

References