CVE-2026-42851
HighCVSS 7.8Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk3th percentile - higher than 3% of all known CVEs
Summary
Kitty is a cross-platform GPU based terminal. In versions prior to 0.47.0, a program able to write bytes to a kitty terminal can cause kitty to execute attacker-supplied Python inside the running kitty process with the user's full privileges.
Risk Assessment
The lack of any user interaction and no remote-control permission requirements poses a serious security risk, allowing attackers to execute arbitrary code on the victim's system.
Recommendation
It is recommended to upgrade to version 0.47.0 or later to mitigate this vulnerability.
Other vulnerabilities in Kitty terminal
See all- CVE-2026-54057High
Kitty is a cross-platform GPU based terminal. In versions prior to 0.47.3, kitty's OSC 21 (color-control) query reply reflects attacker-controlled bytes, including newlines, into the shell's input without sanitization.
- CVE-2026-54056High
In versions 0.47.0 and 0.47.1 of the Kitty terminal, the `kitten dnd` feature can allow a malicious remote drag-and-drop source to overwrite or truncate arbitrary files writable by the local kitty user. The issue arises from the lack of de-duplication of filenames on case-sensitive filesystems.
- CVE-2026-54055Medium
In versions prior to 0.47.2, a local privilege escalation vulnerability exists in Kitty's file transmission protocol. A child process running in the terminal can write to arbitrary files on the filesystem by exploiting a TOCTOU race condition between symlink validation and file creation.
- CVE-2026-42850High
In versions prior to 0.47.0 of the Kitty terminal, it is possible to inject commands into the subshell through a Kitty error. A special escape code causes Kitty to return an error that is not properly escaped and is correctly echoed back to the terminal, allowing it to be executed by the shell in use.
Original NVD description (English source)
Kitty is a cross-platform GPU based terminal. In versions prior to 0.47.0, a program able to write bytes to a kitty terminal — a remote SSH peer, a downloaded file viewed with `cat`, a log line, an email body rendered in `less`, an issue body in a TUI, etc. — can cause kitty to execute attacker-supplied Python inside the running kitty process, with the user's full privileges. There is no approval prompt, no remote-control permission requirement, no shell-integration interaction, no clipboard touch, and no editor interaction. Version 0.47.0 fixes the issue.