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CVE-2020-5260

malicious URLs may cause Git to present stored credentials to the wrong server

Critical9.3EPSS 14.9%
Published
Updated
Reserved
Assigned by
GitHub_M

Description

Affected versions of Git have a vulnerability whereby Git can be tricked into sending private credentials to a host controlled by an attacker. Git uses external "credential helper" programs to store and retrieve passwords or other credentials from secure storage provided by the operating system. Specially-crafted URLs that contain an encoded newline can inject unintended values into the credential helper protocol stream, causing the credential helper to retrieve the password for one server (e.g., good.example.com) for an HTTP request being made to another server (e.g., evil.example.com), resulting in credentials for the former being sent to the latter. There are no restrictions on the relationship between the two, meaning that an attacker can craft a URL that will present stored credentials for any host to a host of their choosing. The vulnerability can be triggered by feeding a malicious URL to git clone. However, the affected URLs look rather suspicious; the likely vector would be through systems which automatically clone URLs not visible to the user, such as Git submodules, or package systems built around Git. The problem has been patched in the versions published on April 14th, 2020, going back to v2.17.x. Anyone wishing to backport the change further can do so by applying commit 9a6bbee (the full release includes extra checks for git fsck, but that commit is sufficient to protect clients against the vulnerability). The patched versions are: 2.17.4, 2.18.3, 2.19.4, 2.20.3, 2.21.2, 2.22.3, 2.23.2, 2.24.2, 2.25.3, 2.26.1.

Scores

CVSS scores of CVE-2020-5260, by who scored it
Scored byCVSSScoreVector
GitHub_MCNA (assigner)3.1Critical9.3CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N
NVDNVD · Modified3.1High7.5CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
EPSS (exploitation in 30 days)
14.9% · top 3.3% of all CVEs (6 Nov 2026)
Loading the EPSS history…

The list uses the assigner's score when there is one, then CISA's, then NVD's: Critical 9.3.

Weakness

Affected products

  • git · git

    • affected < 2.17.4
    • affected >= 2.18.0, < 2.18.3
    • affected >= 2.19.0, 2.19.4
    • affected >= 2.20.0, < 2.20.3
    • affected >= 2.21.0, < 2.21.2
    • affected >= 2.22.0, < 2.22.3
    • affected >= 2.23.0, < 2.23.2
    • affected >= 2.24.0, < 2.24.2
    • affected >= 2.25.0, < 2.25.3
    • affected >= 2.26.0, < 2.26.1

References (19)

Sources

The same CVE in the primary databases and aggregators, to check against.

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Record last updated .