CVE detail

CVE-2023-40581 — CVE-2023-40581

Published 2023-09-25 · Modified 2026-06-17 · Vendor yt-dlp_project · Product yt-dlp · Source nvd
HIGH
severity
CVSS-derived band
8.3
CVSS v3
0–10 scale
0.0129
EPSS probability
exploitation probability, 30d
68.0%
EPSS percentile
percentile vs all CVEs
NOT LISTED
CISA KEV
known exploited catalog

Description

yt-dlp is a youtube-dl fork with additional features and fixes. yt-dlp allows the user to provide shell command lines to be executed at various stages in its download steps through the `--exec` flag. This flag allows output template expansion in its argument, so that metadata values may be used in the shell commands. The metadata fields can be combined with the `%q` conversion, which is intended to quote/escape these values so they can be safely passed to the shell. However, the escaping used for `cmd` (the shell used by Python's `subprocess` on Windows) does not properly escape special characters, which can allow for remote code execution if `--exec` is used directly with maliciously crafted remote data. This vulnerability only impacts `yt-dlp` on Windows, and the vulnerability is present

Remediation

No vendor-published fix data in our corpus for this CVE. Check the references below or the vendor's PSIRT / security advisories page.

References

cvedb.io · NVD · CISA KEV · FIRST EPSS · vendor advisories (CVE Program List v5). Informational only, no warranty — verify every remediation against the vendor advisory before acting on it. This product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD, CISA, FIRST.org or any vendor named. CVE® is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation.