CoreCVE
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HIGH

If an attacker can get a user to open a specially prepared directory tree as a workspace in Visual Studio Code with the CodeQL extension active, arbitrary code of the attacker's choosing may be executed on the user's behalf

Published Nov 25, 2019

Description

If an attacker can get a user to open a specially prepared directory tree as a workspace in Visual Studio Code with the CodeQL extension active, arbitrary code of the attacker's choosing may be executed on the user's behalf. This is fixed in version 1.0.1 of the extension. Users should upgrade to this version using Visual Studio Code Marketplace's upgrade mechanism. After upgrading, the codeQL.cli.executablePath setting can only be set in the per-user settings, and not in the per-workspace settings. More information about VS Code settings can be found here.

Affected products

Remediation

Vendor solution

Manually review the workspace settings for any workspace obtained from an external source. These settings can be found in the .vscode/settings.json file within the workspace directory. Remove the configuration values for the codeQL.cli.executablePath, codeQL.cli.owner, and codeQL.cli.repository settings for the workspace.

If you wish to use the codeQL.cli.executablePath setting to indicate the location of a CodeQL CLI executable, then move this to your user settings, and check that you trust the configured path. You can access the user settings by choosing Preferences: Open User Settings from the Command Palette.

Metrics

Weaknesses (2)

CWE-22

Path Traversal

CWE-250

Execution with Unnecessary Privileges

References (3)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner GitHub_M
Published Nov 25, 2019
Updated Aug 5, 2024
Reserved Sep 24, 2019
Link CVE-2019-16765
CISA Vulnrichment
Updated n/a
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Link CVE-2019-16765
Red Hat
Severity n/a
Public date n/a
Links CVE-2019-16765