CVE-2017-5078 Command injection in Google Chrome prior to 59.0.3071.86 for Linux, Windows and Mac

What is CVE-2017-5078?

CVE-2017-5078 is a high-severity command injection vulnerability in Google Chrome, published on 27 Oct 2017. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

Insufficient validation of untrusted input in Blink's mailto: handling in Google Chrome prior to 59.0.3071.86 for Linux, Windows, and Mac allowed a remote attacker to perform command injection via a crafted HTML page, a similar issue to CVE-2004-0121. For example, characters such as * have an incorrect interaction with xdg-email in xdg-utils, and a space character can be used in front of a command-line argument.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2017-5078?

It affects 4 products.

Products include Google Chrome, Redhat Enterprise Linux Desktop, Redhat Enterprise Linux Server, Redhat Enterprise Linux Workstation.

How do I fix CVE-2017-5078?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

Upgrade, and pass arguments to programs as a list instead of through a shell. More about Command injection.

Is CVE-2017-5078 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2017-5078 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Google Chrome

• CVE-2022-4135 Google Chromium GPU Heap Buffer Overflow Exploited Critical 9.6
• CVE-2020-16017 Google Chrome Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.6
• CVE-2020-16010 Google Chrome for Android UI Heap Buffer Overflow Exploited Critical 9.6
• CVE-2026-87491 Google Chromium V8 Out of Bounds Write Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2026-85046 Google Chromium V8 Type Confusion Exploited High 8.8

All Google Chrome vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-mvv4-2gfv-gwc4, UBUNTU-CVE-2017-5078.