Vulnerability · Published Mar 7, 2022 · Assigned by mitre
CVE-2022-26488
High 7.0
In plain English
A high-severity security flaw in the affected software. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 1.5% (higher than 74% of all known vulnerabilities). Ready-made attack tooling exists: public proof-of-concept code.
Official description
In Python before 3.10.3 on Windows, local users can gain privileges because the search path is inadequately secured. The installer may allow a local attacker to add user-writable directories to the system search path. To exploit, an administrator must have installed Python for all users and enabled PATH entries. A non-administrative user can trigger a repair that incorrectly adds user-writable paths into PATH, enabling search-path hijacking of other users and system services. This affects Python (CPython) through 3.7.12, 3.8.x through 3.8.12, 3.9.x through 3.9.10, and 3.10.x through 3.10.2.