Kovid Goyal Kitty up to 0.48.x Drag/Drop Protocol kitty/dnd.c subdir_data_for_drag path traversal

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability, which was classified as problematic, was found in Kovid Goyal Kitty up to 0.48.x. Affected by this issue is the function subdir_data_for_drag of the file kitty/dnd.c of the component Drag/Drop Protocol. The manipulation results in path traversal. This vulnerability is reported as CVE-2026-80430. The attack can be launched remotely. No exploit exists. You should upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability classified as problematic has been found in Kovid Goyal Kitty up to 0.48.x. Affected is the function subdir_data_for_drag of the file kitty/dnd.c of the component Drag/Drop Protocol. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a path traversal vulnerability. CWE is classifying the issue as CWE-22. The product uses external input to construct a pathname that is intended to identify a file or directory that is located underneath a restricted parent directory, but the product does not properly neutralize special elements within the pathname that can cause the pathname to resolve to a location that is outside of the restricted directory. This is going to have an impact on integrity, and availability. CVE summarizes:

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.

The advisory is available at github.com. This vulnerability is traded as CVE-2026-80430 since 08/26/2026. The exploitability is told to be easy. It is possible to launch the attack remotely. Technical details are known, but there is no available exploit. This vulnerability is assigned to T1006 by the MITRE ATT&CK project.

Upgrading to version 0.49.0 eliminates this vulnerability.

If you want to get best quality of vulnerability data, you may have to visit VulDB.

Productinfo

Vendor

• Kovid Goyal

Name

• Kitty

Version

• 0.1
• 0.2
• 0.3
• 0.4
• 0.5
• 0.6
• 0.7
• 0.8
• 0.9
• 0.10
• 0.11
• 0.12
• 0.13
• 0.14
• 0.15
• 0.16
• 0.17
• 0.18
• 0.19
• 0.20
• 0.21
• 0.22
• 0.23
• 0.24
• 0.25
• 0.26
• 0.27
• 0.28
• 0.29
• 0.30
• 0.31
• 0.32
• 0.33
• 0.34
• 0.35
• 0.36
• 0.37
• 0.38
• 0.39
• 0.40
• 0.41
• 0.42
• 0.43
• 0.44
• 0.45
• 0.46
• 0.47
• 0.48

CPE 2.3info

• 🔒
• 🔒
• 🔒

CPE 2.2info

• 🔒
• 🔒
• 🔒

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Entryinfo

If you want to get best quality of vulnerability data, you may have to visit VulDB.

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