CVE-2026-44723 Command injection in vowpal wabbit
Attackers can execute arbitrary commands on CI runners by crafting malicious pull request titles in Vowpal Wabbit's GitHub Actions workflow.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2026-44723?
CVE-2026-44723 is a medium-severity command injection vulnerability in VowpalWabbit vowpal_wabbit, published on 26 May 2026. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Vowpal Wabbit is a machine learning system. The workflow .github/workflows/python_checks.yml embeds ${{ github.event.pull_request.title }} directly inside double-quoted bash strings in four separate steps across four jobs, each passing it as a CLI argument to the Python test script run_tests_model_gen_and_load.py. The shell interprets the expanded string before invoking Python, allowing an attacker to break out of the quotes and execute arbitrary commands on the runner. The pull_request trigger fires on PRs targeting any branch (branches: ['*']), with no additional access gate. This vulnerability is fixed by the 998e390e80a7e8192d7849b7784bc113dbd190ad commit.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-44723?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Vowpalwabbit Vowpal Wabbit.
How do I fix CVE-2026-44723?
No fix has been published for CVE-2026-44723 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Upgrade, and pass arguments to programs as a list instead of through a shell. More about Command injection.
Is CVE-2026-44723 being exploited?
It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2026-44723 exists.
Sources
Also known as GHSA-cg2g-xgg7-3xxq.