Composer is vulnerable to Command Injection via Malicious Perforce Repository
41Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. It has a public proof of concept.
ssvc Attendcvss 7.8epss 1.1%
from disclosure to weapon1 days
Published on NVDApr 15
1st PoC+1d
exploitation probability
1.1%top 38% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
2 public exploit(s)
Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. Versions 1.0 through 2.2.26 and 2.3 through 2.9.5 contain a command injection vulnerability in the Perforce::generateP4Command() method, which constructs shell commands by interpolating user-supplied Perforce connection parameters (port, user, client) without proper escaping. An attacker can inject arbitrary commands through these values in a malicious composer.json declaring a Perforce VCS repository, leading to command execution in the context of the user running Composer, even if Perforce is not installed. VCS repositories are only loaded from the root composer.json or the composer config directory, so this cannot be exploited through composer.json files of packages installed as dependencies. Users are at risk if they run Composer commands on untrusted projects with attacker-supplied composer.json files. This issue has been fixed in Composer 2.2.27 (2.2 LTS) and 2.9.6 (mainline).
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Affected products
composer · composerpublic PoCs found — 2
githubgithub.com/Saku0512/CVE-2026-40176-poc★ 2githubgithub.com/ikarolaborda/CVE-2026-40176★ 0⚠ Public resources, to assess the exposure of systems you control or are authorized to test. Test only with authorization.
References
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:8165https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-40176https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2458828https://github.com/composer/composer/releases/tag/2.9.6https://github.com/composer/composer/security/advisories/GHSA-wg36-wvj6-r67phttps://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-40176.json