CVE-2026-80430 Path traversal in kitty
A path traversal vulnerability in kitty allows a malicious program to create files and directories outside the intended staging directory via symlink manipulation.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- A user has to click or open something
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2026-80430?
CVE-2026-80430 is a medium-severity path traversal vulnerability in Kovid Goyal kitty, published on 25 Sep 2026. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.
Official description
Improper Link Resolution Before File Access in the drag source staging path of the drag and drop protocol in kitty from 0.47.0 before 0.49.0 allows a program writing to the terminal to create files and directories at paths outside the staging directory, because subdir_data_for_drag() in kitty/dnd.c resolves a descendant of the staged item tree by constructing a path string and opening it with safe_open(path, O_DIRECTORY | O_RDONLY, 0) rather than by walking the tree one component at a time, so a client that declares two entries with the same name, the first a symlink whose target is an arbitrary absolute path and the second a directory, causes mkdirat() to fail with EEXIST, which the code ignores, and causes the subsequent path resolution to follow the symlink and return a directory descriptor outside the staging directory, which is then passed as the dirfd argument to add_payload() and used for every further create operation on that item and its descendants. Entry names are sanitised against path separators and dot components, but symlink targets are not validated. Files are created with O_CREAT | O_WRONLY | O_EXCL at mode 0644, so existing files cannot be overwritten, and directories are created with mkdirat() at mode 0755, so the attacker can create intermediate directories that did not previously exist. This results in the creation of files and directories at any path writable by the user running kitty, provided the symlink target is an existing directory.
Weakness: CWE-59
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-80430?
How do I fix CVE-2026-80430?
No fix has been published for CVE-2026-80430 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Upgrade, and resolve every user-supplied path against an allowed base folder before opening it. More about Path traversal.
Is CVE-2026-80430 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-80430 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2026-80430, GHSA-phg7-mgrc-j9pj, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-80430.