PT-2026-6460 · Npm · Renovate

Published

2026-01-13

·

Updated

2026-01-13

CVSS v3.1

6.7

Medium

VectorAV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Summary

Renovate can be tricked into executing shell code while updating the Gradle Wrapper. A malicious distributionUrl in gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties can lead to command execution in the Renovate runtime.

Details

When Renovate handles Gradle Wrapper artifacts, it may run a wrapper update command such as:
  • ./gradlew :wrapper --gradle-distribution-url <value>
In the observed behavior, Renovate executes this via a shell (e.g., /bin/sh -c ...). If distributionUrl contains shell command substitution syntax like $(...), the shell evaluates it before Gradle validates/parses the URL.
After that, Gradle attempts to parse the URL as a URI and fails with URISyntaxException, but the shell substitution has already executed.
This is reproducible even when allowScripts is disabled (default is OFF), because this execution happens as part of Gradle Wrapper artifact handling rather than “repository install scripts”.
Prerequisites / attack conditions:
  • The attacker must be able to get a malicious gradle-wrapper.properties into a repository that Renovate scans (e.g., direct write access, or a maintainer merges an attacker’s change/PR).
  • Renovate must be configured to process Gradle Wrapper updates/artifacts for that repository (default behavior for the Gradle Wrapper manager).

PoC

  1. Create a repository with a Gradle Wrapper (gradlew, gradlew.bat, gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.jar, and gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties).
  2. Set distributionUrl in gradle-wrapper.properties to include $(...).
  3. Run Renovate against the repository.
  4. Observe that a file is created during Renovate’s wrapper update step before Gradle fails with URISyntaxException.
A [screen recording](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nveSCgyz4pKPCZuelqDD xGEO00DXr4P/view) is attached showing end-to-end reproduction. In the demo, the payload creates /tmp/passwd dump containing /etc/passwd, demonstrating that file read/exfiltration is possible within the Renovate execution context.

Impact

This allows arbitrary command execution in the Renovate runtime during Gradle Wrapper updates. Depending on deployment, this may expose credentials/tokens available to the bot and may allow an attacker to modify repositories or access internal resources reachable from the Renovate environment.

Remediation

Upgrading to Renovate 42.68.5 (2025-12-31) fixes this issue, and closes out other risks of shell evaluation for commands run by Renovate.
If using the composer, yarn (v1) or flux managers, please upgrade to 42.74.5 (2026-01-08), as there were follow-up fixes to keep these managers working.

Fix

OS Command Injection

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Weakness Enumeration

CWE-78

Related Identifiers

GHSA-PFQ2-HH62-7M96

Affected Products

Renovate