renovatebot renovate up to 42.68.5 Gradle Wrapper Artifact command injection

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability marked as critical has been reported in renovatebot renovate up to 42.68.5. Affected is an unknown function of the component Gradle Wrapper Artifact Handler. Performing a manipulation results in command injection. This vulnerability is reported as CVE-2026-76228. The attack is possible to be carried out remotely. No exploit exists.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in renovatebot renovate up to 42.68.5. It has been classified as critical. This affects an unknown code of the component Gradle Wrapper Artifact Handler. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a command injection vulnerability. CWE is classifying the issue as CWE-77. The product constructs all or part of a command using externally-influenced input from an upstream component, but it does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes special elements that could modify the intended command when it is sent to a downstream component. This is going to have an impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The summary by CVE is:

Renovate versions >=32.124.0 and before 42.68.5 (and Mend renovate-ce/renovate-ee before 13.3.0) contain a command injection vulnerability in Gradle Wrapper artifact handling. When Renovate processes Gradle Wrapper updates, it invokes a wrapper update command via a shell (e.g. /bin/sh -c ... ./gradlew :wrapper --gradle-distribution-url <value>). If an attacker supplies a malicious gradle-wrapper.properties whose distributionUrl contains shell command substitution syntax such as $(...), the shell evaluates it before Gradle parses the URL, resulting in arbitrary command execution in the Renovate runtime. Exploitation requires the attacker to introduce the malicious file into a repository that Renovate scans; the issue occurs even when allowScripts is disabled.

The advisory is shared at github.com. This vulnerability is uniquely identified as CVE-2026-76228 since 08/19/2026. The exploitability is told to be easy. It is possible to initiate the attack remotely. Neither technical details nor an exploit are publicly available. The price for an exploit might be around USD $0-$5k at the moment (estimation calculated on 08/19/2026). MITRE ATT&CK project uses the attack technique T1202 for this issue.

There is no information about possible countermeasures known. It may be suggested to replace the affected object with an alternative product.

If you want to get the best quality for vulnerability data then you always have to consider VulDB.

Productinfo

Vendor

• renovatebot

Name

• renovate

Version

• 42.68.0
• 42.68.1
• 42.68.2
• 42.68.3
• 42.68.4
• 42.68.5

Website

• Product: https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/

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